Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/229

Rh which he presently said: 'I want what Miss Delavoy can do, but I don't want this kind of thing!' And he shook my proof at me as if for a preliminary to hurling it.

I took it from him, to show I anticipated his violence, and, profoundly bewildered, I turned over the challenged pages. They grinned up at me with the proof-reader's shocks, but the shocks, as my eye caught them, bloomed on the spot like flowers. I didn't feel abased—so many of my good things came back to me. 'What on earth do you seriously mean? This thing isn't bad. It's awfully good—it's beautiful.'

With an odd movement he plucked it back again, though not indeed as if from any new conviction. He had had after all a kind of contact with it that had made it a part of his stock. 'I dare say it's clever. For the kind of thing it is, it's as beautiful as you like. It's simply not our kind.' He seemed to break out afresh. 'Didn't you know more?'

I waited. 'More what?'

He in turn did the same. 'More everything. More about Delavoy. The whole point was that I thought you did.'

I fell back in my chair. 'You think my article shows ignorance? I sat down to it with the sense that I knew more than any one.'

Mr. Beston restored it again to my hands. 'You've kept that pretty well out of sight then. Didn't you get anything out of her? It was simply for that I addressed you to her.'

I took from him with this, as well, a silent statement of what it had not been for. 'I got everything in the wide world I could. We almost worked together, but what appeared was that all her own knowledge, all her own view, quite fell in with what I had already said. There appeared nothing to subtract or to add.'

He looked hard again, not this time at me, but at the document in my hands. 'You mean she has gone into all that—seen it just as it stands there?'

'If I've still.' I replied, 'any surprise left, it's for the