They had a thousand subjects to speak about. Every topic came at random. They cared not which it was, for each seemed ever new. Meg was like a child who has never seen the sea, now picking up rainbow shells by the shore; every shell different in the heap lying beside her in a glorious chance medley.
Sometimes he entertained her with scenes of travel, of striving and success. Sometimes they interchanged memories, mutually reminding each other of incidents in the past. With grave humor, followed by hearty laughter, he would describe the part she had played in some scene where she had behaved with great motherliness and dignity toward him. He would tell her how she had never despaired of him, although the bailiffs were after him.
"But I was a sad trouble to you, Meg," he vowed. "You were a little tyrant then. Where is all that tyranny gone?"
"You give me no excuse to exercise it," she replied one day. "The instinct may be there still; but you are so good, so absorbed in work now."
"Ah, if you only knew it!" he exclaimed. "Little Meg would have been more quick-sighted. She would have sternly reproved me, and preached to me about wasting my time when I should be furnishing copy."
"Copy! What is copy?" she asked.
"Blessed ignorance! Copy is that which goes to fill those columns of print. It is what the hungry printer clamors for, and looks very black when he does not get."
Meg laughed.
"You speak as if printers were wild beasts fed with leaders on schemes for extending the franchise or removing some dowdy old tax."
"Well, well, I am a humbug. All the time that I am writing these leaders I am thinking of coming to see you; I hurry through my work in order to be in time to meet you, Meg," he answered.