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 he was joking, that it would be about three hundred pages.

Richards set down his glass and in his face I recognized the portentous expression of a man about to be delivered of an epigram. It came: I dislike pine-apples, women with steatopygous figures, and men with a gift for paronomasia.

Jennings ignored this ignoble interruption. George Moore has written somewhere, he said, that if an author talks about what he is going to write, usually he writes it, but when he talks about how he is going to write it, that is the end of the matter. I wonder if this is true? I have never thought much about it before but I think perhaps it is. I think your friend will never write his book.

Richards interrupted again: Look at that maquereau. That's the celebrated French actor who went to America after a brilliant career in France in the more lucrative of his two professions, which ended in a woman's suicide. His history was well-known to the leading woman of the company with which he was to play in America, but she had never met him. At the first rehearsal, when they were introduced, she remarked, Monsieur, la connaissance est dèjá faite! Turning aside, he boasted to his male companions, La gueuse! Avant dix jours je l'aurai enfilée! In a week he had made good his threat and in two weeks the poor woman was without a pearl.