Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/369

THE PAPERS "Yes, for the stuff. But when you've had—as you had had from him—the stuff?"

"Well, sometimes, you see, I get more. He gives me all I can take." It was in her head to ask if by chance Bight were jealous, but she gave it another turn. "We had a big palaver, partly about you. He appreciates."

"Me?"

"Me—first of all, I think. All the more that I've had—fancy!—a proof of my stuff, the despised and rejected, as originally concocted, and that he has now seen it. I tried it on again with Brains, the night of your thing—sent it off with your thing enclosed as a rouser. They took it, by return, like a shot—you'll see on Wednesday. And if the dear man lives till then, for impatience, I'm to lunch with him that day."

"I see," said Bight. "Well, that was what I did it for. It shows how right I was."

They faced each other, across their thick crockery, with eyes that said more than their words, and that, above all, said, and asked, other things. So she went on in a moment: "I don't know what he doesn't expect. And he thinks I can keep it up."

"Lunch with him every Wednesday?"

"Oh, he'd give me my lunch, and more. It was last Sunday that you were right—about my sitting close," she pursued. "I'd have been a pretty fool to jump. Suddenly, I see, the music begins. I'm awfully obliged to you."

"You feel," he presently asked, "quite differently—so differently that I've missed my chance? I don't care for that serpent, but there's something else that you don't tell me." The young man, detached and a little spent, with his shoulder against the wall and a hand vaguely playing over the knives, forks and spoons, dropped his succession of sentences without an apparent direction. "Something else has come up, and you're 357