immersed in a book--so absorbed that he has let the fire go out--I
propose to slip gently down the chimney and leave this tribute in
his stocking. It is not a personal tribute. I speak, on behalf of
the whole fraternity of writers, this word of gratitude--and envy.

No one who has ever done any writing, or has any ambition toward
doing so, can ever be a Perfect Reader. Such a one is not
disinterested. He reads, inevitably, in a professional spirit. He
does not surrender himself with complete willingness of enjoyment.
He reads "to see how the other fellow does it"; to note the turn of
a phrase, the cadence of a paragraph; carrying on a constant
subconscious comparison with his own work. He broods constantly as
to whether he himself, in some happy conjuncture of quick mind and
environing silence and the sudden perfect impulse, might have
written something like that. He is (poor devil) confessedly selfish.
On every page he is aware of his own mind running with him, tingling
him with needle-pricks of conscience for the golden chapters he has
never written. And so his reading is, in a way, the perfection of
exquisite misery--and his writing also. When he writes, he yearns to
be reading; when he reads, he yearns to be writing.

But the Perfect Reader, for whom all fine things are written, knows
no such delicate anguish. When he reads, it is without any _arrière
pensée_, any twingeing consciousness of self. I like to think of one
Perfect Reader of my acquaintance. He is a seafaring man, and this
very evening he is in his bunk, at sea, the day's tasks completed.
Over his head is a suitable electric lamp. In his mouth is a pipe
with that fine wine-dark mahogany sheen that resides upon excellent
briar of many years' service. He has had (though I speak only by
guess) a rummer of hot toddy to celebrate the greatest of all