(I am considering all these matters, I need scarce say, only as they are concerned with that faculty.

With a relation NOT imaginative to his material the storyteller has nothing whatever to do.) It exactly happened moreover that my own material here was to profit in a particular way by that extension of view.

My idea was to be treated with light irony--it would be light and ironical or it would be nothing; so that I asked myself, naturally, what might be the least solemn form to give it, among recognised and familiar forms.

The question thus at once arose: What form so familiar, so recognised among alert readers, as that in which the ingenious and inexhaustible, the charming philosophic "Gyp" casts most of her social studies?
Gyp had long struck me as mistress, in her levity, of one of the happiest of forms--the only objection to my use of which was a certain extraordinary benightedness on the part of the Anglo-Saxon reader.

One had noted this reader as perverse and inconsequent in respect to the absorption of "dialogue"-- observed the "public for fiction" consume it, in certain connexions, on the scale and with the smack of lips that mark the consumption of bread-and-jam by a children's school-feast, consume it even at the theatre, so far as our theatre ever vouchsafes it, and yet as flagrantly reject it when served, so to speak, au naturel.