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conversations play the very deuce with one's story. I had intended to have commenced this book with something quite terrific—a murder, or a marriage: and I find that all my great ideas have ended in a lounge. After all it is, perhaps, the most natural termination. In life surely, man is not always as monstrously busy, as he appears to be in novels and romances. We are not always in action—not always making speeches, or making money, or making war, or making love. Occasionally we talk,—about the weather, generally—sometimes about ourselves—