CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO




APOLOGIA PRO NOVELLISSIMO SUO.





   Who said, by this was a novel? Who (also and moreover) defined a novel? Novellum -- that's a new little thing. Most novels are not that. This is the newest little thing yet writ --  even Lippy Leila and Sawny Simeon agreed to that! So let me flaunt it on my title: a novellisim! That will show that Our Story is no ordinary novel. Some readers read so wondrous carefully that it may be just the right time to tell them that!


   And so they tell me that Our Story has no order, no form, no concentration -- ay! there's the rub! This talk of concentration is vile Puritanical tyranny, with its roots in bourgeois utilitarianism. Beauty is with the butterfly at least as much as with the ant. What says the Broadway Jew when he is `in love'? ``Get busy with your face, kid!'' I know it saves time, but yet I feel a certain poignancy, as of loss, somewhere. Need I make further apology for the method of this novellissim? Well, Louis says, that we cannot help thinking a little of Laurence Sterne and Rabelais; to which I answer ``Would Got 'twere so!'' when modern poetry scans, it must jbe a theft from Swinburne; when it doesn't, from Browning; where it's hashed prose, from Whitman. What's one to do? Faith, 'tis as bad as morals in the English mind. If one happens at any time to be alone, its onanism; with a woman, fornication; with a man or a dog, something worse; in a crowd, a ``priapic orgie.'' You can't get away from it. So why should we try, dear girls? We won't. Come off the grass! And that reminds me that I ought to tell you about Kitty Williams.