Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/223

Rh I considered. 'You know the great type.'

'Oh, I don't know Mr. Beston as an editor.'

'As what, then?'

'Well, as what you call, I suppose, a man of the world. A very kind, clever one.'

'Of course I see him mainly in the saddle and in the charge—at the head of his hundreds of thousands. But I mustn't undermine him,' I added, smiling, 'when he's doing so much for me.'

She appeared to wonder about it. 'Is it really a great deal?'

'To publish a thing like that? Yes—as editors go. They're all tarred with the same brush.'

'Ah, but he has immense ideas. He goes in for the best in all departments. That's his own phrase. He has often assured me that he'll never stoop.'

'He wants none but "first-class stuff." That's the way he has expressed it to me; but it comes to the same thing. It's our great comfort. He's charming.'

'He's charming,' my friend replied; and I thought for the moment we had done with Mr. Beston. A rich reference to him, none the less, struck me as flashing from her very next words—words that she uttered without appearing to have noticed any I had pronounced in the interval. 'Does no one, then, really care for my brother?'

I was startled by the length of her flight. 'Really care?'

'No one but you? Every month your study doesn't appear is at this time a kind of slight.'

'I see what you mean. But of course we're serious.'

'Whom do you mean by "we"?'

'Well, you and me.'

She seemed to look us all over and not to be struck with our mass. 'And no one else? No one else is serious?'

'What I should say is that no one feels the whole thing, don't you know? as much.'

Miss Delavoy hesitated. 'Not even so much as Mr. Beston?'