Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/245

Rh only enough to show, more markedly, that he followed her example. 'I'll do anything, I'll do everything for you in life,' he declared to her, 'but publish such a thing as that.'

She gave in all decorum to this statement the minute of concentration that belonged to it; but her analysis of the matter had for sole effect to make her at last bring out, not with harshness, but with a kind of wondering pity: 'I think you're really very dreadful!'

'In what esteem then, Mr. Beston,' I asked, 'do you hold John Delavoy's work?'

He rang out clear. 'As the sort of thing that's out of our purview!' If for a second he had hesitated it was partly, I judge, with just resentment at my so directly addressing him, and partly, though he wished to show our friend that he fairly faced the question, because experience had not left him in such a case without two or three alternatives. He had already made plain indeed that he mostly preferred the simplest.

'Wonderful, wonderful purview!' I quite sincerely, or at all events very musingly, exclaimed.

'Then, if you could ever have got one of his novels?' Miss Delavoy inquired.

He smiled at the way she put it; it made such an image of the attitude of The Cynosure. But he was kind and explicit. 'There isn't one that wouldn't have been beyond us. We could never have run him. We could never have handled him. We could never, in fact, have touched him. We should have dropped to—oh, Lord!' He saw the ghastly figure he couldn't name—he brushed it away with a shudder.

I turned, on this, to our companion. 'I wish awfully you'd do what he asks!' She stared an instant, mystified; then I quickly explained to which of his requests I referred. 'I mean I wish you'd do the nice familiar chat about the sweet home-life. You might make it inimitable, and, upon my word, I'd give you for it the assistance of my general lights. The thing is—don't you see?—that it would put Mr. Beston in a