This is the first opportunity I have had of answering your letter, although I am hardly to blame since you chose to write anonymously and leave me with no better clue to your address than the Tunbridge Wells postmark.

Fee! Fi! Fo! Fum! I am sorry about Torps, though. I admit his death was a mistake, and I fancy my Publisher thought so too: but we cannot very well bring him to life again, like Sherlock Holmes. So please cheer up, and remember that there are just as many fine fellows in the ink-pot as ever came out of it.

I have borne in mind the final paragraph of your letter, which said, "We do beseech you not to kill the India-rubber Man." In fact, I originally meant him to be the hero of this book. But as the book progressed I found the melancholy conviction growing on me that the India-rubber Man had become infernally dull. A pair of cynical bachelors like you will, I know, attribute this to marriage and poor Betty. For my part I am inclined to put it down to advancing years.

I have just finished the book, and, turning over the pages, found myself wondering how you will like it. It has been written in so many different moods and places and noises and temperatures that the general effect is rather patchwork. But, after all, it was written chiefly for the amusement of two people, and (as I believe all story-books ought to be written) out of some curiosity on the Author's part to know "what happened next."

Thus, you see, I strive to disarm all critics at the outset by the assumption of an ingenuous indifference to anything they can say. But there is one portion of the book on which I have expended so much thought and care that I am willing to defy criticism on the subject. I refer to the Dedication.

You probably skip Dedications, but they interest me, and I have studied them a good deal. They are generally arranged in columns like untidy addition sums, and no two lines are the same length. This is very important. At the end you arrive, as it were by a series of stepping-stones, at the climax. And there you are.

No. Let the critics say what they will about the book: but I hold that the Dedication is It.

Yours sincerely,

"Bartimeus"

October, 1917.