Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/243

Rh after which she faced him again. 'If you'll publish our friend here, I'll do them.'

'Why are you so awfully wound up about our friend here?'

'Read his article over—with a little intelligence—and your question will be answered.'

Mr. Beston glanced at me and smiled as if with a loyal warning; then, with a good conscience, he let me have it. 'Oh, damn his article!'

I was struck with her replying exactly what I should have replied if I had not been so detached. 'Damn it as much as you like, but publish it.' Mr. Beston, on this, turned to me as if to ask me if I had not heard enough to satisfy me: there was a visible offer in his face to give me more if I insisted. This amounted to an appeal to me to leave the room at least for a minute; and it was perhaps from the fear of what might pass between us that Miss Delavoy once more took him up. 'If my brother's as vile as you say!'

'Oh, I don't say he's vile!' he broke in.

'You only say I am!' I commented.

'You've entered so into him,' she replied to me, 'that it comes to the same thing. And Mr. Beston says further that out of this unmentionableness he wants somehow to make something—some money or some sensation.'

'My dear lady,' said Mr. Beston, 'it's a very great literary figure!'

'Precisely. You advertise yourself with it because it's a very great literary figure, and it's a very great literary figure because it wrote very great literary things that you wouldn't for the world allow to be intelligibly or critically named. So you bid for the still more striking tribute of an intimate picture—an unveiling of God knows what!—without even having the pluck or the logic to say on what ground it is that you go in for naming him at all. Do you know, dear Mr. Beston,' she asked, 'that you make me very sick? I count on