The point we would make--and we might as well try to drive it home without further ineffectual attempts at illustration--is that you must do some patterning with your material, whether bricks for a building or lives for a story; but if you pattern too preciously your building will be contemptible and your story without a soul. In your building you must not be so decided as to leave no play for another’s imagination, contemplating the structure. In your narrative you must not be so dogmatic about two and two adding to four as to leave no room for a wild speculation that perhaps they came to five. For it is not the certainty that two and two have always made four but the possibility that some day they may make five that makes life worth living--and guessing about on the printed page. 11 Perhaps the most serious consequence of writing a novel is the revelation of yourself it inevitably entails. We are not thinking, principally, of the discovery you will make of the size of your own soul. We have in mind the laying bare of yourself to others. Of course you do reveal yourself to yourself when you write a book to reveal others to others. It has been supposed that a man cannot say or do a thing which does not expose his nature. This is nonsense; you do not expose your nature every time you take the subway, though a trip therein may very well be an index to your manners. The fact remains that no man ever made a book or a play or a song or a poem, with any command of the technique of his work, without in some measure giving himself away. Where this is not enough of an inducement some other, such as a tin whistle with every bound copy, is offered; no small addition as it enables the reviewer to declare, hand on heart, that “this story is not to be whistled down the wind.” Some have doubted Bernard Shaw’s Irishism, which seems the queerer as nearly everything he has written has carried a shillelagh concealed between the covers. Recently Frank K. Reilly of Chicago gave away one-cent pieces to advertise a book called _Penny of Top Hill Trail_. He might be said, and in fact he hereby is said, thus to have coppered his risk in publishing it.... All of which is likely to be mistaken for jesting. Let us therefore jest that we may be taken with utmost seriousness.