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I finished my whisky and soda and poured out another. Allen was on his favorite subject, the great past age of New England. He was speaking of Hawthorne and of the literary background. I imagine that he had forgotten himself in his discourse, if such a feat were possible. His voice with its perfectly timed emphasis was as vital and tireless as an actor's at rehearsal.

"The brittle, mechanized short fiction, the perfunctory, meaningless novel of today," he said—"we should do something about it. We all should try."

I resented that remark, because he was speaking of the art of fiction when he had never attempted to write a story, or certainly had never ventured to exhibit the result. He had never attempted to make something out of nothing, because he was too cautious, like most critics. It may have been that the rest of us had the blissfulness of ignorance, but at least we were able to manufacture character and incident, however bad, out of nothing but our thoughts and observations. We had a sense, poor perhaps, of detail and of dramatic unity. At any rate my kind had been bold enough to try.