His manner led her to suspect that the good-looking lounger was as vain and heartless as he was frivolous, and she felt no inclination to listen to his trifling, sans souci chatter; consequently, when he thrust himself into her presence, she either picked up a book or left him to be entertained by the children.
One evening in November she sat in her own room preparing to write, and pondering the probable fate of a sketch which she had finished and dispatched two days before to the office of the magazine.
The principal aim of the little tale was to portray the horrors and sin of duelling, and she had written it with great care; but well aware of the vast, powerful current of popular opinion that she was bravely striving to stem, and fully conscious that it would subject her to severe animadversion from those who defended the custom, she could not divest herself of apprehension lest the article should be rejected.
The door bell rang, and soon after a servant brought her a card: "Mr.
D.G. Manning. To see Miss Earl."
Flattered and frightened by a visit from one whose opinions she valued so highly, Edna smoothed her hair, and with trembling fingers changed her collar and cuffs, and went downstairs, feeling as if all the blood in her body were beating a tattoo on the drum of her ears.
As she entered the library, into which he had been shown (Mrs. Andrews having guests in the parlor), Edna had an opportunity of looking unobserved at this critical ogre, of whom she stood in such profound awe.
Douglass Manning was forty years old, tall, and well built; wore slender, steel-rimmed spectacles which somewhat softened the light of his keen, cold, black eyes; and carried his slightly bald head with the haughty air of one who habitually hurled his gauntlet in the teeth of public opinion.
He stood looking up at a pair of bronze griffins that crouched on the top of the rosewood bookcase, and the gas-light falling full on his face, showed his stern, massive features, which, in their granitic cast, reminded Edna of those Egyptian Androsphinx—vast, serene, changeless.
There were no furrows on cheek or brow, no beard veiled the lines and angles about the mouth, but as she marked the chilling repose of the countenance, so indicative of conscious power and well-regulated strength, why did memory travel swiftly back among the "Stones of Venice," repeating the description of the hawthorn on Bourges Cathedral? "A perfect Niobe of May." Had this man petrified in his youth before the steady stylus of time left on his features that subtle tracery which passing years engrave on human faces? The motto of his magazine, Veritas sine clementia, ruled his life, and, putting aside the lenses of passion and prejudice, he coolly, quietly, relentlessly judged men and women and their works; neither loving nor hating, pitying nor despising his race; looking neither to right nor left; laboring steadily as a thoroughly well-balanced, a marvellously perfect intellectual automaton.
"Good evening, Mr. Manning. I am very glad to meet you; for I fear my letters have very inadequately expressed my gratitude for your kindness."