Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/242

234 force of this challenge. 'Have you never discovered, all this time, that my brother's work is my pride and my joy?'

'Oh, my dear thing!'—and Mr. Beston broke into a cry that combined in the drollest way the attempt to lighten his guilt with the attempt to deprecate hers. He let it just flash upon us that, should he be pushed, he would show as—well, scandalised.

The tone in which Miss Delavoy again addressed him offered a reflection of this gleam. 'Do you know what my brother would think of you?'

He was quite ready with his answer, and there was no moment in the whole business at which I thought so well of him. 'I don't care a hang what your brother would think!'

'Then why do you wish to commemorate him?'

'How can you ask so innocent a question? It isn't for him.'

'You mean it's for the public?'

'It's for the magazine,' he said with a noble simplicity.

'The magazine is the public,' it made me so far forget myself as to suggest.

'You've discovered it late in the day! Yes,' he went on to our companion, 'I don't in the least mind saying I don't care. I don't—I don't!' he repeated with a sturdiness in which I somehow recognised that he was, after all, a great editor. He looked at me a moment as if he even guessed what I saw, and, not unkindly, desired to force it home. 'I don't care for anybody. It's not my business to care. That's not the way to run a magazine. Except of course as a mere man!'—and he added a smile for Miss Delavoy. He covered the whole ground again. 'Your reminiscences would make a talk!'

She came back from the greatest distance she had yet reached. 'My reminiscences?'

'To accompany the head.' He must have been as tender as if I had been away. 'Don't I see how you'd do them?'

She turned off, standing before the fire and looking into it;