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Editor Westbrook conceded a smile of impervious complacency.

“I think,” said he, “that in real life the woman would express herself in those words or in very similar ones.”

“Not in a six hundred nights’ run anywhere but on the stage,” said Dawe hotly. “I’ll tell you what she’d say in real life. She’d say: ‘What! Bessie led away by a strange man? Good Lord! It’s one trouble after another! Get my other hat, I must hurry around to the police-station. Why wasn’t somebody looking after her, I’d like to know? For God’s sake, get out of my way or I’ll never get ready. Not that hat–the brown one with the velvet bows. Bessie must have been crazy; she’s usually shy of strangers. Is that too much powder? Lordy! How I’m upset!’

“That’s the way she’d talk,” continued Dawe. “People in real life don’t fly into heroics and blank verse at emotional crises. They simply can’t do it. If they talk at all on such occasions they draw from the same vocabulary that they use every day, and muddle up their words and ideas a little more, that’s all.”

“Shack,” said Editor Westbrook impressively, “did you ever pick up the mangled and lifeless form of a child from under the fender of a street car, and carry it in your arms and lay it down before the distracted mother? Did you ever do that and listen to the words of grief and despair as they flowed spontaneously from her lips?”

“I never did,” said Dawe. “Did you?”

“Well, no,” said Editor Westbrook, with a slight frown. “But I can well imagine what she would say.”

“So can I,” said Dawe.

And now the fitting time had come for Editor Westbrook to play the oracle and silence his opinionated contributor. It was not for an unarrived fictionist to dictate words to be uttered by the heroes and heroines of the Minerva Magazine, contrary to the theories of the editor thereof.

“My dear Shack,” said he, “if I know anything of life I know that every sudden, deep and tragic emotion in the human heart calls forth an apposite, concordant, conformable and proportionate expression of feeling. How much of this inevitable accord between expression and feeling should be attributed to nature, and how much to the influence of art, it would be difficult to say. The sublimely terrible roar of the lioness that has been deprived of her cubs is dramatically as far above her customary whine and purr as the kingly and transcendent utterances of Lear are above the level of his senile vaporings. But it is also true that all men and women have what may be called a sub-conscious dramatic sense that is awakened by a sufficiently deep and powerful emotion–a sense unconsciously acquired from literature and the stage that prompts them to express those emotions in language befitting their importance and histrionic value.”

“And in the name of the seven sacred saddle-blankets of Sagittarius, where did the stage and literature get the stunt?” asked Dawe.

“From life,” answered the editor, triumphantly.

The story writer rose from the bench and gesticulated eloquently but dumbly. He was beggared for words with which to formulate adequately his dissent.

On a bench nearby a frowzy loafer opened his red eyes and perceived that his moral support was due a downtrodden brother.

“Punch him one, Jack,” he called hoarsely to Dawe. “W’at’s he come makin’ a noise like a penny arcade for amongst gen’lemen that comes in the square to set and think?”

Editor Westbrook looked at his watch with an affected show of leisure.

“Tell me,” asked Dawe, with truculent anxiety, “what especial faults in ‘The Alarum of the Soul’ caused you to throw it down?”

“When Gabriel Murray,” said Westbrook, “goes to his telephone and is told that his fianc’ee has been shot by a burglar, he says–I do not recall the exact words, but–“