ABSTRACT
Just about once a year I fall into conversation with a woman who is imbued—I started to say endowed—with the virtue of practicality. Knowing me as a reader of all kinds of books, but as one who has a penchant for those books which have a capability of carrying me off into some realm beyond the horizon of everyday existence, she likes to take it upon herself to chide me about what she calls my helplessness in the face of reality and with preferring a dream world to the world of everyday living. One of her chief lines of attack against such natures as mine is to rally her arguments against books which are built around pure imagination, and she holds that these dream-filled writings are fairy tales that are destructive of the true purposes of life and rife with the dangerous unrealities that lead men and women to lead less than practical lives. Now I have known this woman for long enough to recognize, at the first sound of her argument, that she will never have done with baiting me along these lines, and that I am drawn almost against my will into argument (she starts by calling it “discussion”) which she has been carefully preparing agianst the moment when she entraps me with some new comment about my impractical reading interests.
