Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/238

230 Mr. Beston was amused, but not enough amused to sit down, and we stood there while, for the third time, my proof-sheets were shaken for emphasis. 'I've been reading these over,' she said as she held them up.

Mr. Beston, on what he had said to me of them, could only look grave; but he tried also to look pleasant, and I foresaw that, on the whole, he would really behave well. 'They're remarkably clever.'

'And yet you wish to publish instead of them something from so different a hand?'

He smiled now very kindly. 'If you'll only let me have it! Won't you let me have it? I'm sure you know exactly the thing I want.'

'Oh, perfectly!'

'I've tried to give her an idea of it,' I threw in.

Mr. Beston promptly saw his way to make this a reproach to me. 'Then, after all, you had one yourself?'

'I think I couldn't have kept so clear of it if I hadn't had!' I laughed.

'I'll write you something', Miss Delavoy went on, 'if you'll print this as it stands.' My proof was still in her keeping. Mr. Beston raised his eyebrows. Print two? Whatever do I want with two? What do I want with the wrong one if I can get the beautiful right?'

She met this, to my surprise, with a certain gaiety. 'It's a big subject—a subject to be seen from different sides. Don't you want a full, a various treatment? Our papers will have nothing in common.'

'I should hope not!' Mr. Beston said good-humouredly. 'You have command, dear lady, of a point of view too good to spoil. It so happens that your brother has been really less handled than any one, so that there's a kind of obscurity about him, and in consequence a kind of curiosity, that it seems to me quite a crime not to work. There's just the perfection, don't you know? of a little sort of mystery—a tantalising