Page:Firecrackers a realistic novel.pdf/180

 interest. You do not appear to have many illusions, she volunteered.

Illusions! It would be pleasant if nobody had any. Only the thoroughly disillusioned expect nothing from others. They make life slightly more human. But all of us have illusions, or sentimental moods, which amount to the same thing. . . . My God! he went on, tossing his thick hair back with one hand, have you ever observed that after a few cocktails you can listen to a banal waltz played in a dimly lighted theatre and feel as sweet or good or true or noble as the most fatuous moron ever felt? I always become sentimental after I drink cocktails and music aggravates the sensation.

Have you written a book about that? If you have I'll read it.

It's damned difficult to get any intangible thought into a book. Anything subtle is almost impossible to get into a book. Yet that is the only thing I want todo. My reward is that after I get it in—or at least think I get it in—nobody knows it's there, unless I tell them. An old English actor, one George Bartley, said of the British theatre-going public: You must first tell them that you are going to do so and so; you must then tell them that you are doing it, and then that you have done it; and then, by God, perhaps they will understand you! Well, the same thing is true of the novel-reading public, but I don't tell them, and they don't under