"That is a greater violation of confidence still," Fairfield responded. "Indeed, it was a most un-gentlemanly thing of Mr. Cutliff. He only knew it because a stupid errand boy carried him the manuscript by mistake. He had no right to tell that. I shall give him my opinion of his conduct."
Mrs. Croydon accomplished a small whirlwind of ribbon ends, and waved her plump hand in remonstrance.
"Oh, I beg you won't," she protested. "It will get me into trouble if you do. He especially told me not to let you know."
Fairfield smiled rather sardonically.
"The man who betrays a confidence is always foolish enough to suppose his confidence will be sacred. I think this is an outrageous breach of good faith on Mr. Cutliff's part."
Mrs. Croydon gave a hitch forward as if she were trying to bring her chair closer to that of Fairfield.
"As I was saying," she remarked, "we society women have really so little time to give to literature, and literature needs just our touch so much, that it has been especially gratifying to find one that could carry out my ideas so well."
The young man began to regard her with a new expression in his face. As a literary woman she should have recognized the look, the expression which tells of the author on the scent of material. Whether Fairfield ever tried his hand at painting Mrs. Croydon or not, that look would have made it plain to any well-trained fellow worker that her peculiarities tempted his literary sense. Any professional writer who listens with that gleam in his eyes is inevitably examining what is said, the manner of its saying, the person who is speaking, in the hope that here he has a subject for his pen; he is asking himself if the reality is too absurd to be credible; how much short of the extravagance of the original he must come to keep within the bounds of seeming probability. Fairfield was confronted with a subject which could not be handled frankly and truthfully. Nobody would believe the tone of the woman or her remarks to be anything but a foolish exaggeration; if she had had the genuine creative instinct, the power of analysis, the recognition of human peculiarities, Mrs. Croydon must have seen in his evident preoccupation the indication that he was deliberating how far toward the truth it would in fiction be possible to go.
"It is very kind of you," he murmured vaguely.
"Oh, don't mention it," responded she, more graciously than ever. "You are really one of us now, as I said; and I always feel strongly the ties of the literary guild."