The Devil To Pay

I am informed that certain persons of high ego or low conscience spend all their waking hours in the soul-searching effort to find resemblances between themselves and the multifarious offspring of the literary imagination.

Consequently I feel constrained to assert the self-evident fact that what follows in these pages is a work of fiction; and that, if any character in it resembles any real person whatsoever in name, physique, idiosyncrasy, mental equipment, cultural or professional background, or general morality, such deplorable resemblance should be construed as an act of God with which the author had nothing consciously to do.

E. Q.