“Yes. I hope I deserve it. Do you think you will ever forgive me for supplanting the hero Marian deserves?”
“If you had let your chance of her slip, I should have despised you, I think: at least, I should if you had missed it with your eyes open. I am so far prejudiced in your favor that I think Marian would not like you unless you were good. I have known her to pity people who deserved to be strangled; but I never knew her to be attracted by any unworthy person except myself; and even I have my good points. You need not trouble yourself to agree with me: you could not do less, in common politeness. As I am rather tired, I shall go and sit in the vestibule until the others are ready to go home. In the meantime you can tell me all the particulars you care to trust me with. Marian will tell me the rest when we go home.”
“That is an undeserved stab,” said Conolly.
“Never mind: I am always stabbing people. I suppose I like it,” she added, as they went together to the vestibule.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Leith Fairfax had not been wasting her time. She had come upon Douglas in the large room, and had recognized him by his stature and proud bearing, in spite of the handsome Assyrian beard he had allowed to grow during his stay abroad.
“I have been very anxious to see you,” said she, forcing a conversation upon him, though he had saluted her formally, and had evidently intended to pass on without speaking. “If your time were not too valuable to be devoted to a poor hard-working woman, I should have asked you to call on me. Dont deprecate my forbearance. You are Somebody in the literary world now.”
“Indeed? I was not aware that I had done anything to raise me from obscurity.”
“I assure you you are very much mistaken, or else very modest. Has no one told you about the effect your book produced here?”
“I know nothing of it, Mrs. Leith Fairfax. I never enquire after the effect of my work. I have lived in comparative seclusion; and I scarcely know what collection of fugitive notes of mine you honor by describing as a book.”
“I mean your ‘Note on three pictures in last year’s Salon,’ with the sonnets, and the fragment from your unfinished drama. Is it finished, may I ask?”