“Let’s talk. We were speaking of Mr. Bazzard. It’s a secret, and moreover it is Mr. Bazzard’s secret; but the sweet presence at my table makes me so unusually expansive, that I feel I must impart it in inviolable confidence. What do you think Mr. Bazzard has done?”
“O dear!” cried Rosa, drawing her chair a little nearer, and her mind reverting to Jasper, “nothing dreadful, I hope?”
“He has written a play,” said Mr. Grewgious, in a solemn whisper. “A tragedy.”
Rosa seemed much relieved.
“And nobody,” pursued Mr. Grewgious in the same tone, “will hear, on any account whatever, of bringing it out.”
Rosa looked reflective, and nodded her head slowly; as who should say, “Such things are, and why are they!”
“Now, you know,” said Mr. Grewgious, “I couldn’t write a play.”
“Not a bad one, sir?” said Rosa, innocently, with her eyebrows again in action.
“No. If I was under sentence of decapitation, and was about to be instantly decapitated, and an express arrived with a pardon for the condemned convict Grewgious if he wrote a play, I should be under the necessity of resuming the block, and begging the executioner to proceed to extremities,—meaning,” said Mr. Grewgious, passing his hand under his chin, “the singular number, and this extremity.”
Rosa appeared to consider what she would do if the awkward supposititious case were hers.