Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/240

232 'Ah, but I forbid you to use it! This gentleman is my witness that my prohibition is absolute.'

'Was it to be your witness that you sent for the gentleman? You take immense precautions!' Mr. Beston exclaimed. Before she could retort, however, he came back to his strong point. 'Do you coolly ask of me to sacrifice ten thousand subscribers?'

The number, I noticed, had grown since the morning, but Miss Delavoy faced it boldly. 'If you do, you'll be well rid of them. They must be ignoble, your ten thousand subscribers.'

He took this perfectly. 'You dispose of them easy! Ignoble or not, what I have to do is to keep them and if possible add to their number; not to get rid of them.'

'You'd rather get rid of my poor brother instead?'

'I don't get rid of him. I pay him a signal attention. Reducing it to the least, I publish his portrait.'

'His portrait—the only one worth speaking of? Why, you turn it out with horror.'

'Do you call the only one worth speaking of that misguided effort?' And, obeying a restless impulse, he appeared to reach for my tribute; not, I think, with any conscious plan, but with a vague desire in some way again to point his moral with it.

I liked immensely the motion with which, in reply to this, she put it behind her: her gesture expressed so distinctly her vision of her own lesson. From that moment, somehow, they struck me as forgetting me, and I seemed to see them as they might have been alone together; even to see a little what, for each, had held and what had divided them. I remember how, at this, I almost held my breath, effacing myself to let them go, make them show me whatever they might. 'It's the only one', she insisted, 'that tells, about its subject, anything that's any one's business. If you really want John Delavoy, there he is. If you don't want him, don't insult him with an evasion and a pretence. Have at least the courage to say that you're afraid of him!'

I figured Mr. Beston here as much incommoded; but all too