“There is a passage in the autobiography (more or less true) of Alonso de Contreras, who began life as a scullion and ended it as a Knight of Malta, that has always seemed to me a masterpiece of narrative and an example of perfect style. Having at one period of his picturesque career married the well-to-do widow of a judge his suspicions were aroused that she was deceiving him with his most intimate friend. One morning he discovered them in one another’s arms. ‘Murieron,’ he writes. ‘They died.’ With that one grim word he dismisses the matter and passes on to other things. That is proper writing.”
W. Somerset Maugham, Don Fernando