Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/226

218 broke ground by letting him know that I had had even yet no proof.

'Oh, yes! about Delavoy. Well, I've rather expected you, but you must excuse me if I'm brief. My absence has put me back; I've returned to arrears. Then from Paris I meant to write to you, but even there I was up to my neck. I think, too, I've instinctively held off a little. You won't like what I have to say—you can't! He spoke almost as if I might wish to prove I could. 'The fact is, you see, your thing won't do. No—not even a little.'

Even after Miss Delavoy's note it was a blow, and I felt myself turn pale. 'Not even a little? Why, I thought you wanted it so!'

Mr. Beston just perceptibly braced himself. 'My dear man, we didn't want that! We couldn't do it. I've every desire to be agreeable to you, but we really couldn't.'

I sat staring. 'What in the world's the matter with it?'

'Well, it's impossible. That's what's the matter with it.'

'Impossible?' There rolled over me the ardent hours and a great wave of the feeling that I had put into it.

He hung back but an instant—he faced the music. 'It's indecent.'

I could only wildly echo him. 'Indecent? Why, it's absolutely, it's almost to the point of a regular chill, expository. What in the world is it but critical?'

Mr. Beston's retort was prompt. 'Too critical by half! That's just where it is. It says too much.'

'But what it says is all about its subject.'

'I dare say, but I don't think we want quite so much about its subject.'

I seemed to swing in the void and I clutched, fallaciously, at the nearest thing. 'What you do want, then—what is that to be about?'

'That's for you to find out—it's not my business to tell you.'