Hubert, of course, noticed nothing: but Geoffrey Alison grew weary of her constant admonitions as to silence.
"Oh, for Heaven's sake, Zoë," he cried at last (for he was getting almost husbandly in his remarks, encouraged by their common secret), "do try and get rid of the idea that 'all is discovered' and I'm a silly ass or else a beastly cad!"
"It isn't that," she answered with a gloomy petulance; "but something might easily happen and I simply don't know how I should face Hubert."
"Hubert? Why, I expect he would be jolly proud of you."
"Proud?" she repeated bitterly; "when he has been so splendid to me always, and here I am making him out a selfish brute who sacrifices his wife's happiness to his career and me a poor little bullied creature who goes upstairs and cries. He'd never believe that it was all exaggerated—and nor, of course, would anybody else. Proud, indeed? I do like that!"
Indeed, when she thought of what an awful thing she had done, Helena very often could have gone upstairs like flabby Zoë (née Virginia) and wept.
Geoffrey Alison at length got thoroughly impatient with her.
He was enjoying it all hugely and he failed to see why she should not enjoy it too. Every day he opened his paper eagerly to see what new scheme the resourceful Blatchley had devised to spur a public interest which as yet showed no signs of flagging.
Helena, in sympathy with her whole scheme, had much exaggerated the eminence of the Husband's position. It was not a case of any back-street Kit Kats here: he was away, night after night, delivering most brilliant lectures to exclusive West End literary clubs or even travelling four hundred miles to unveil well-earned lapidary tributes of great authors who had actually managed to be dead now for a hundred years. This husband, who deserted his wife and was jealous if she went to anything with any other man, was not an author of the Hubert Brett class, so that big names were thrown about at parties where in very truth the problem soon became a topic. Each had it on the best authority that So-and-So, the celebrated author, or Mrs. So-and-So, had said this or the opposite; and nobody believed the other's story.
Nothing sells a book like talk. The printed word, paid or unpaid, is only useful to set tongues a-wagging. And as the authorship was bandied here and there, editions trickled slowly from the Press.