"Yes," she said, hoping that she was not blushing. "But not too loud as it's an awful secret. Hubert doesn't know."
He tip-toed at it with exaggerated caution. "Oh-ho!" he whispered. "Then I guess: it's all about him! It is a safety-valve."
This was a little joke: they were devoted, he knew, though he could never understand what she saw in the great, conceited, selfish brute: but Helena felt sure now that the blush was there.
"No," she was bound to answer, and when he asked, "Fiction?" in surprise, it must be "Yes." And so it was, by now, she argued. A safety-valve at first perhaps, because Hugh seemed to loathe her having even the most usual ideas, but fiction certainly by now, for the ideas of Virginia were not her own ideas; the silly, sloppy thing!
"I'm going to read it please," he said and began collecting the loose pages (the book had long ago been cast aside).
"Certainly not," she answered, very dignified, and trying to forget that they were the words of a comic song she had heard on the gramophone.
"Oh, but yes," he answered.
"Give it to me," she said, turning now to melodrama for her catch-phrase.
He held the prize by sitting on it. "Listen," he began, as staidly argumentative as though he had been drunk: and then he paused. "If you let me read it," he said presently, "I'll tell you what I think of it and I bet it's original. If you don't let me read it, I shall tell—your husband!"
"You wouldn't be such a cad," she answered. She never knew when he was serious, because he often looked most funny then.