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 Grover gave her a sidelong glance, for he suspected Lila of being what Sophie had once called a pis aller. "I used to think Eric was sweet on you," he ventured. "He always had a sort of gone look in his eye when your name came on the carpet."

"He was—a little," she admitted.

"Only a little?"

"Well, quite a lot."

"I don't see how you kept from jumping at him."

"I'm married to my job," she said succinctly.

And for some reason, rather drearily, that led to the question of his return to France.

"There's only one thing I'm waiting for now," he informed her.

"What is that?"

"A letter from Geoffrey Saint."

He couldn't explain to her that he had dispatched to Geoffrey the manuscript of a novel, a revised version of a recalcitrant story on which he had been working for goodness knew how long, and if he had told her, he wouldn't have been able to add that his nervous system was laboring under the strain of a possible adverse criticism. To himself he had admitted that if he were to fall down in this attempt, there would be nothing left. All his faith in himself would then seem to him as empty as the boyishly vaunting phrases he had come across only a few days since when, in pulling out a book from a shelf in the library, he had found between the leaves one of his old letters to