"Oh, shut up!" said Quarren tranquilly. "If you're a novelist you write to amuse people, and you ought to be thankful that you've succeeded." "Confound it!" roared Westguard, "I write to _instruct_ people! not to keep 'em from yawning!" "Then you've made a jolly fluke of it, that's all--because you have accidentally written a corking good story--good enough and interesting enough to make people stand for the cold chunks of philosophical admonition with which you've spread your sandwich--thinly, Heaven be praised!" "I write," said Westguard, furious, "because I've a message to deliv----" "Help!" moaned Quarren. "You write because it's in you to do it; because you've nothing more interesting to do; and because it enables you to make a decent and honourable living!" "Do those reasons prevent my having a message to deliver?" roared Westguard. "No, they exist in spite of it. You'd write anyway, whether or not you believed you had a message to deliver. You've written some fifteen novels, and fifteen times you have smothered your story with your message. This time, by accident, the story got its second breath, and romped home, with 'Message' a bad second, and that selling plater, 'Philosophy,' left at the post----" "Go on!--you irreverent tout!" growled Westguard; "I want my novels read, of course. Any author does. But I wish to Heaven somebody would try to interpret the important lessons which I----" "Oh, preciousness and splash! Tell your story as well as you can, and if it's well done there'll be latent lessons enough in it." "Are you perhaps instructing me in my own profession?" asked the other, smiling. "Heaven knows I'm not venturing----" "Heaven knows you _are_! Also there is something In what you say--" He sat smoking, thoughtfully, eyes narrowing in the fire--"if I only _could_ manage that!--to arrest the public's attention by the rather cheap medium of the story, and then, cleverly, shoot a few moral pills into 'em.... That's one way, of course----" "Like the drums of the Salvation Army." Westguard looked around at him, suspiciously, but Quarren seemed to be serious enough. "I suppose it doesn't matter much how a fellow collects an audience, so that he does collect one." "Exactly," nodded Quarren. "Get your people, then keep 'em interested and unsuspecting while you inject 'em full of thinks." Westguard smoked and pondered; but presently his lips became stern and compressed. "I don't intend to trifle with my convictions or make any truce or any compromise with 'em," he announced. "I'm afraid that this last story of mine ran away with me."