Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/231

Rh array. I took it in, sounding it hard for some hidden vice, but with a frank relish, in effect, of its lucidity; than I answered: 'If they won't stand it, what will they stand?'

Mr. Beston looked about and put a few objects on his table to rights. 'They won't stand anything.' He spoke with such pregnant brevity as to make his climax stronger. 'And quite right too! I'm right, at any rate; I can't plead ignorance. I know where I am, and I want to stay there. That single page would have cost me five thousand subscribers.'

'Why, that single page is a statement of the very essence!'

He turned sharp round at me. 'Very essence of what?'

'Of my very topic, damn it.'

'Your very topic is John Delavoy.'

'And what's his very topic? Am I not to attempt to utter it? What under the sun else am I writing about?'

'You're not writing in The Cynosure about the relations of the sexes. With those relations, with the question of sex in any degree, I should suppose you would already have seen that we have nothing whatever to do. If you want to know what our public won't stand, there you have it.'

I seem to recall that I smiled sweetly as I took it. 'I don't know, I think, what you mean by those phrases, which strike me as too empty and too silly, and of a nature therefore to be more deplored than any, I'm positive, that I use in my analysis. I don't use a single one that even remotely resembles them. I simply try to express my author, and if your public won't stand his being expressed, mention to me kindly the source of its interest in him.'

Mr. Beston was perfectly ready. 'He's all the rage with the clever people—that's the source. The interest of the public is whatever a clever article may make it.'

'I don't understand you. How can an article be clever, to begin with, and how can it make anything of anything, if it doesn't avail itself of material?'