Page:Earl Derr Biggers - Seven Keys to Baldpate (1913).djvu/34

18 my public laying down my fall novel and sighing for my early spring styles in fiction. I remem- bered that once upon a time a critic advised me to go away for ten years to some quiet spot, and think. I decided to do it. Baldpate Inn is the quiet spot."

You don't mean," gasped Mr. Quimby, "that you're going to stay there ten years ?"

"Bless you, no," said Mr. Magee. "Critics ex- aggerate. Two months will do. They say I am a cheap melodramatic ranter. They say I don't go deep. They say my thinking process is a scream. I'm afraid they re right. Now, I'm going to go up to Baldpate Inn, and think. I'm going to get away from melodrama. I'm going to do a novel so fine and literary that Henry Cabot Lodge will come to me with tears in his eyes and ask me to join his bunch of self-made Immortals. I'm go- ing to do all this up there at the inn sitting on the mountain and looking down on this little old world as Jove looked down from Olympus."

"I don't know who you mean," objected Mr. Quimby.