"We assure you we are not. It is no more a conundrum than the others. Come: question!"
"Well, in the first place, I should like to know what a plot is. Something that has occurred to you primarily as an effect from your experience or observation? Or something you have carpentered out of the old stuff of your reading, with a wooden hero and heroine reciprocally dying for each other, and a wooden villain trying to foil them?"
"You had better ask a current editor or a stagnant. Do you confess yourself posed by this plain problem? Do you give it up?"
"For the present. Perhaps I may gather light from the next question."
"Then here it is: '4. What do you consider the primary weakness in the average stories or verses of the old writers?"
"Oh, that is easy. The same as in the average stories and verses of the younger writers—absence of mind."
"Are you sure you are not shirking? Cannot you give a categorical answer—something that will really help some younger writer to take the place which you are now more or less fraudulently holding? The younger writers will cheerfully allow that the trouble is absence of mind, but what line of reading would you suggest which would turn this into presence of mind?"
"There is none, except to have themselves newly ancestored. Presence of mind as well as absence of mind is something derived; you cannot acquire it."
"We think you might be a little less sardonic. Now here is the next problem: '5. What are the successful author's necessary qualifications in the matters of natural ability, education, life as he sees it and lives it, technical training, etc?'"
"This will be the death of me!" the prominent author lamented. "Couldn't I skip that one?"