“You have my entire assent to every reform you may suggest to me, Dan,” concluded Lionel, smiling at his guide, who remarked that he had never yet seen that smile on his pupil’s lips nor ever remarked that look in his eyes; he was sure something new had happened to illumine the face of the Mayfair cynic. “I am afraid you will come in for a good share in this evolution, Murray,” and Lionel turned his face towards the novelist. “Fiction as you conceive it is a thing of the past. Clothes and environment have clung like a Nessus robe round your feminine heroines and masculine personages, and given them a rag-shop philosophy. Tear the bandages that swathed your fictional humanity, and send into the open air your _dramatis personæ_, to compete, fight and win in the race of life. You have believed yourself long enough the apostle of subtle psychology and of morbid physiology; for once be the humble disciple of Dame Nature, for she is now turning her bull’s-eye lantern right into your face and making you squint.” “My lord is right,” crowed the mischievous buffoon. “I feel sure your publisher will not bring out your next book; sorry for you, old fellow, but you see there is no money in it any more. I saw Christopher a few days ago, and he led me to understand that the kind of fiction you excelled in will not appeal any longer to the general public. One of the two; either the feminine reader is one who harbours a sickly regret for her past toggery, or she is a modern woman won over to the cause of true modesty. In the first case she will throw your book away, for it will make her feel discontented with her present state; and in the latter instance she will shut your pages while blushes will cover her lovely cheeks at the mere thought of anything so indecent as—clothes. But, of course, I forget that the books published now will necessarily be very limited, as parchment is the only available material on which written thought can be printed.” “And an excellent thing it is. We have written too much—written ourselves dry; and now has come a breathing-time in which we shall be able to incubate.” This was Tom Hornsby, who indeed had written himself to desiccation in the _Weekly Mirror_. “We have game laws, and we know precious well how to enforce them. Why should we compel our sapless brains to generate when we know so well their incapacity even to conceive? Brains are no more inexhaustible than is the cow’s milk; still, we do not give to the children of our minds the proper breeding period, and we hail the events of our abortions as if it were the advent of some divine prophecy.” “That is about what old Christopher led me to understand,” said Danford. “But, however well these abortions may have paid formerly, he knows now that they will not satisfy an Edenic public any longer. Publishers are first-rate at feeling the public’s pulse.”