And he also got to know pretty well,
   Louise Quelquechose,
      Antoinette Alphabetic,
         Estelle Etcetera.

And during this same time Art began to call him—­
   Pictures began to appeal to him. 
      Statues beckoned to him. 
         Music maddened him,
            and any form of Recitation or Elocution drove
               him beside himself.

(III)

Then, one day, he married Margaret Jones. 
   As soon as he had married her
      He was disillusioned. 
         He now hated her.

Then he lived with Elizabeth Smith—­
   He had no sooner sat down with her than—­
      He hated her.

Half mad, he took his things over to Arabella Thompson’s flat to live with her.

The moment she opened the door of the apartment, he loathed
her. 
   He saw her as she was.

Driven sane with despair, he then—­

(Our staff here cut the story off.  There are hundreds and hundreds of pages alter this.  They show Edward Endless grappling in the fight for clean politics.  The last hundred pages deal with religion.  Edward finds it after a big fight.  But no one reads these pages.  There are no women in them.  Our staff cut them out and merely show at the end—­

Edward Purified—­
Uplifted—­
Transluted.

The whole story is perhaps the biggest thing ever done on this continent.  Perhaps!)

II.  Snoopopaths; or, Fifty Stories in One

This particular study in the follies of literature is not so much a story as a sort of essay.  The average reader will therefore turn from it with a shudder.  The condition of the average reader’s mind is such that he can take in nothing but fiction.  And it must be thin fiction at that—­thin as gruel.  Nothing else will “sit on his stomach.”

Everything must come to the present-day reader in this form.  If you wish to talk to him about religion, you must dress it up as a story and label it Beth-sheba, or The Curse of David; if you want to improve the reader’s morals, you must write him a little thing in dialogue called Mrs. Potiphar Dines Out.  If you wish to expostulate with him about drink, you must do so through a narrative called Red Rum—­short enough and easy enough for him to read it, without overstraining his mind, while he drinks cocktails.

But whatever the story is about it has got to deal—­in order to be read by the average reader—­with A man and A woman, I put these words in capitals to indicate that they have got to stick out of the story with the crudity of a drawing done by a child with a burnt stick.  In other words, the story has got to be snoopopathic.  This is a word derived from the Greek—­“snoopo”—­or if there never was a Greek verb snoopo, at least there ought to have been one—­and it means just what it seems to mean.  Nine out of ten short stories written in America are snoopopathic.