Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/222

214 'Oh, if you say so!' Miss Delavoy sighed and turned away.

'We must have time for the portrait; it will require great care,' Mr. Beston said.

'Oh, please be sure it has the greatest!' I eagerly returned.

But Miss Delavoy took this up, speaking straight to Mr. Beston. 'I attach no importance to the portrait. My impatience is all for the article.'

'The article's very neat. It's very neat,' Mr. Beston repeated. 'But your drawing's our great prize.'

'Your great prize,' our young lady replied, 'can only be the thing that tells most about my brother.'

'Well, that's the case with your picture,' Mr. Beston protested.

'How can you say that? My picture tells nothing in the world but that he never sat for another.'

'Which is precisely the enormous and final fact!' I laughingly exclaimed.

Mr. Beston looked at me as if in uncertainty and just the least bit in disapproval; then he found his tone. 'It's the big fact for The Cynosure. I shall leave you in no doubt of that!' he added, to Miss Delavoy, as he went away.

I was surprised at his going, but I inferred that, from the pressure at the office, he had no choice; and I was at least not too much surprised to guess the meaning of his last remark to have been that our hostess must expect a handsome draft. This allusion had so odd a grace on a lover's lips that, even after the door had closed, it seemed still to hang there between Miss Delavoy and her second visitor. Naturally, however, we let it gradually drop; she only said with a kind of conscious quickness: 'I'm really very sorry for the delay,' I thought her beautiful as she spoke, and I felt that I had taken with her a longer step than the visible facts explained. 'Yes, it's a great bore. But to an editor—one doesn't show it.'

She seemed amused. 'Are they such queer fish?'