'What do you think of authors?' I once asked an editor.
'I hate 'em!' he answered without a moment's hesitation.
Another editor assured me, with a weary sigh, that authors were 'kittle cattle.' This affords a writer a little leap of amusement. So editors suffer from authors, even as authors from editors! Well, yes, we _are_ kittle cattle! But some of this is due, no doubt, to what people expect of us. I was presented once to a lady who immediately fixed me with an eager eye.
'I am making a study of the habits of authors,' she announced. (Here a dreadful sinking of the heart assailed me.) 'Kindly tell me at what hour you retire.'
'Usually at half-past ten,' I answered wretchedly.
At that, as I had expected, her eyebrows went up. 'The author of _When All Was Dark_,' she informed me, 'sits up all night. She says she cannot sleep until she has savored the dawn.' However, she was kind enough to give me another chance. 'What do you eat?' she asked.
'Not _breakfast_!' she pleaded. 'Why, St. George Dreamer _never_ takes more than three drops of brandy on a lump of sugar in the morning. Just the sight of a coffee cup will upset his work for a week.'
And then she left me, sure, I have no doubt, that no real author could confess to such distressingly normal habits as mine.
Doubtless she is an eager reader of all those little paragraphs informing us how authors write. How this one has to have his black mammy rub his head for an hour before he can even think of work; and that one confesses that to write a love scene she must have the odor of decayed bananas in the room. Well, the world would be a sadder place without these little paragraphs. Would that I had something of a like nature to offer! But alas! I have no black mammy, and the smell of over-ripe fruit leaves my hero cold. Also, to give forth such gems of information one must be able to observe a certain rule. It is, Don't laugh or you might wake up. This rule is always sacredly in force at literary gatherings. The fact of being an author, and of being at an authors' meeting, induces, it appears, an intense seriousness. In my younger days I did not realize this, and once at a gathering of this nature, I asked a carefree question. 'Do you think,' I inquired of the author next me, 'that it is possible for an unmusical person to write verse?'