Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/230

222 your question implies. You put our heads together, and you've surely known all along that they've remained so. She told me a month ago that she had immediately let you know the good she thought of what I had done.'

Mr. Beston very candidly remembered, and I could make out that if he flushed as he did so it was because what most came back to him was his own simplicity. 'I see. That must have been why I trusted you—sent you, without control, straight off to be set up. But now that I see you!' he went on.

'You're surprised at her indulgence?'

Once more he snatched at the record of my rashness—once more he turned it over. Then he read out two or three paragraphs. 'Do you mean she has gone into all that?'

'My dear sir, what do you take her for? There wasn't a line we didn't thresh out, and our talk wouldn't for either of us have been a bit interesting if it hadn't been really frank. Have you to learn at this time of day,' I continued, 'what her feeling is about her brother's work? She's not a bit stupid. She has a kind of worship for it.'

Mr. Beston kept his eyes on one of my pages. 'She passed her life with him and was extremely fond of him.'

'Yes, and she has the point of view and no end of ideas. She's tremendously intelligent.'

Our friend at last looked up at me, but I scarce knew what to make of his expression. 'Then she'll do me exactly what I want.'

'Another article, you mean, to replace mine?'

'Of a totally different sort. Something the public will stand.' His attention reverted to my proof, and he suddenly reached out for a pencil. He made a great dash against a block of my prose and placed the page before me. [sic]Do you pretend to me they'll stand that?'

'That' proved, as I looked at it, a summary of the subject, deeply interesting, and treated, as I thought, with extraordinary art, of the work to which I gave the highest place in my author's