Who can write in such a state? It is only fair to take a rest and brace
up. [Blank Page]



II

NOVEL-READERS

AS DISTINGUISHED FROM WOMEN AND NIBBLERS AND AMATEURS


There is, of course, but one sort of novel-reader who is of any
importance He is the man who began under the age of fourteen and
is still sticking to it--at whatever age he may be--and full of
a terrifying anxiety lest he may be called away in the midst of
preliminary announcements of some pet author's "next forthcoming." For
my own part I cannot conceive dying with resignation knowing that the
publishers were binding up at the time anything of Henryk Sienckiewicz's
or Thomas Hardy's. So it is important that a man begin early, because he
will have to quit all too soon.

There are no women novel-readers. There are women who read novels, of
course; but it is a far cry from reading novels to being a novel-reader.
It is not in the nature of a woman. The crown of woman's character is
her devotion, which incarnate delicacy and tenderness exalt into perfect
beauty of sacrifice. Those qualities could no more live amid the
clashings of indiscriminate human passions than a butterfly wing could
go between the mill rollers untorn. Women utterly refuse to go on with a