"Do you know that you are the cause of my destruction of three-fourths of a story I have written?"
Her astonishment at his utterance was due to the fact that she did not at all understand him.
"I? Why?"
"The day we met here—a red-letter day in the calendar of my life—when first we sat together on this seat, I was dissatisfied with the heroine I was creating: she was not good enough. You came; I put you in my book; put you in the place of the creation I had been dissatisfied with—the study from life was so much better. And it was so simple; I never had to wander or imagine things about her. She was always—is always—before me."
She persisted in her affected disregard—a poor sort of performance—of the meaning in his voice; asked:
"How have you painted her—me?"
"Unsophisticated, ingenuous, frank, guileless. She comes into the life of a man who has lived away from women, who has never believed in them, never wanted to. She makes the man see the error of his ways; leads him out of the darkness and blackness of his night into the brightness of her day. She becomes his sun."
His words, the manner of their utterance, made her bosom rise and fall. The deep earnestness in his voice would have moved a much harder heart than hers.
"And he?"
His eyes lighted up as, in reply to that question, he began a sort of description of himself.