Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/336

THE BETTER SORT He wondered, and she seemed to wonder that he didn't see. "Is it a situation for a 'ply'?"

"No, it's too good for a ply—yet it isn't quite good enough for a short story."

"It would do then for a novel?"

"Well, I seem to see it," Maud said—"and with a lot in it to be got out. But I seem to see it as a question not of what you or I might be able to do with it, but of what the poor man himself may. That's what I meant just now," she explained, "by my having a creepy sense of what may happen for him. It has al ready more than once occurred to me. Then," she wound up, "we shall have real life, the case itself."

"Do you know you've got imagination?" Her friend, rather interested, appeared by this time to have seized her thought.

"I see him having for some reason, very imperative, to seek retirement, lie low, to hide, in fact, like a man wanted, but pursued all the while by the lurid glare that he has himself so started and kept up, and at last literally devoured ('like Frankenstein,' of course!) by the monster he has created."

"I say, you have got it!"—and the young man flushed, visibly, artistically, with the recognition of elements which his eyes had for a minute earnestly fixed. "But it will take a lot of doing."

"Oh," said Maud, "we sha'n't have to do it. He'll do it himself."

"I wonder." Howard Bight really wondered. "The fun would be for him to do it for us. I mean for him to want us to help him somehow to get out."

"Oh, 'us'!" the girl mournfully sighed.

"Why not, when he comes to us to get in?"

Maud Blandy stared. "Do you mean to you personally? You surely know by this time that no one ever 'comes' to me."

"Why, I went to him in the first instance; I made up 324