We were sitting in the cozy Kapp living room, watching a fire die in the fireplace and each of us waiting for someone else to abandon his or her drink long enough to throw a log on it-on the fire, dummy, not on the drink. And after we had discussed and condemned the Long Island newspapermen, the housewife on the back cover, the publisher, the reading public, and in fact everything connected with the aforementioned book except the demurely dimpled behind on its front cover, and after the conversation had died down rather like the fire and each of us had gone off in a huddle with private thoughts, I said, “You know, we could do something like that.”

“Like what?”

“Naked Came the Clyde. A bestseller.”

Priss made one of her faces at me, at once narrowing her eyes and raising her eyebrows. I think the operative adjective is querulous. Harry gazed off into the middle distance, either exploring the possibilities or gathering wool.

Priss said, “We’re not writers, love.”

“Neither were those twenty-four guys.”

“They were newspapermen.”

“Doesn’t count,” Harry said. “A newspaperman is just a schmuck who covers high school track meets and then spells everybody’s name wrong.”

“That off the top of your head?”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s not bad,” Priss said. “Actually, one of us sort of is a writer. Rho wrote tons of things at school. And you’ve written things since then, haven’t you?”

“I’ve begun things.”

“Well begun,” said Harry, “is half done.”

“I think the line about the newspapermen has more of a feeling of originality to it,” I told him. “Anyway, nothing I’ve started has been well begun. Or at least not well enough begun so as to ever be finished. Though some of them were promising. But that’s the whole point, don’t you see?”