Whereupon another revelation comes to you: your story is "modern." That is only another way of saying that it has tacitly eliminated factors common to all the novels you had been brought up on—novels you had assumed your readers had been brought up on. Readers who have read many novels may catch factors in your story that you failed to "cancel out," and they will think you old-fashioned. Readers who have read few novels may not recognize your two-thirds as their four-sixths! They may consequently doubt your final product and think you over-modern. Readers who have read no novels to speak of may think you mad and your hero madder. They may not even be aware that "heroes" were cancelled out years ago and that death is not necessarily a tragedy. They may see darkness where you saw dawn, futility where you saw hope, despair where you saw transfiguration. And you can't hum in for them the subsidiary voices; the best you can do is to attempt a preface to the new edition, and you abhor prefaces.
New York, 1924.
