“I don’t suppose she talked to you about it, Jasper,” said Miss Howe sharply.
“I? I was never of her counsels. But I got my amusement out of the affair. Dear, delightful woman? She behaved like a schoolgirl sent to Coventry. I remember congratulating her on the advertisement, and she would hardly speak to me. But it suited her, the blush.”
“Wasn’t it an advertisement!” said the Baxter girl longingly.
“If one could have got her to see it,” said Anita. “But no, she insisted on being ashamed of herself. She said to me once that the critics had ‘read in’ things that she had never dreamed of—that it made her doubt her own motives—that she felt dirtied and miserable. And yet she wouldn’t alter one of those scenes. Obstinate! She could be very obstinate.”
“Oh, which scenes?” The Baxter girl stuck her elbows on the table and her chin in her fists. Her eyes sparkled. “Oh, then, Miss Serle, did you—? did she come to you in the early days? Did you help her too?”
“My daughter—very kind to young people!”
It was a mere mutter, but I recognized the swing of the phrase. Anita didn’t. She was busy with the Baxter girl.
“I don’t say that there would be no Madala Grey today if I——”
“But——” said Mr. Flood.
“But—” said Miss Howe, “she’s Anita’s discovery. We’re never to forget that, are we, darling?”