"Is that because you want to get everything?" he enquired gayly.
A pale flush rose to her forehead, and the glow heightened the singular illumination which dwelt in her face. "Would the best that you could give be more than a little?"
"It would be more than a woman ever got on earth."
"Well, I'm not sure that I would accept your valuation," she remarked, with an effort to keep up the light tone of banter.
"Then make your own," he answered, as he rose from his chair, but his eyes and the strong pressure of his hand on hers said more than this.
"When I've read through the manuscript I'll talk to you about it," she observed, as he was leaving "If you really want them published, though, they must be considerably altered."
"Oh, do it yourself," he returned, with an embarrassed eagerness. "Do anything you please—put in the literary stuff and all that."
He spoke with an entire unconsciousness of the amount of work he asked of her, and she liked him the better for the readiness with which he took for granted that she possessed the patience as well as the will to serve him.
"Well, we'll talk about it later," she said, and then for the first time during the conversation she raised upon him, in all its mystery of suggestion, that subtle fascination of look which he felt at the instant to be her transcendent if solitary beauty. Through the afternoon he had waited patiently for this remembered smile—had laid traps for it, had sought in vain to capture it unawares, and had she been a worldly coquette bent upon conquest, she could not have used her weapons with a finer or more decisive effect. After more than two hours in which her remoteness had both disappointed and irritated him, he went away at last with her face at its most radiant moment stamped upon his memory.