"He used to write some," said Mrs. Lister in a childish way. "He played some, too, on the piano. No, I didn't know that anything was published."
"Will you come out and speak to this gentleman? Do you feel able to speak to him?"
Mrs. Lister walked toward the door without answering. She rested her hand for an instant on the door frame and felt for the step with perceptible confusion. If the sunshine looked suddenly dark, and the honeysuckle seemed to exhale a sickly odor, it was not the first time in her life that under like circumstances she had held her head bravely. She had heard every word the stranger had said. If she had put on spectacles of some strange, distorting medium, he could not have looked more monstrous, more frightful to her. She gave him a cold hand because his own hand reached for it, and then sat down.
Utterly repeated his account of the finding of Basil Everman's stories and his estimate of his genius. He expressed in even more realistic phrase his admiration for the insight of the younger generation of writers. He said that modern literature was finding material in thieves, drunkards, in what had hitherto been considered bottomless pits. Even Keats had said that truth was beauty.
He recounted with witty embroidery how he had asked the brakeman and the conductor and the person whom he called "mine host" about Basil Everman and how none of them could tell him anything.
"But the little tavern gave the whole thing away. The heroine of 'Bitter Bread' takes refuge in just such a place; there is the identical worn doorstep and the fly-blown bottles and the print over the bar which pictures exactly her own arrival. There, at least, Basil Everman must have been long enough to have a photographic impression printed on his sensitive brain."
Dr. Lister's hands, lying upon the arms of his chair, straightened themselves as though, using them as a fulcrum, he meant to rise with a mighty spring. The tavern was not a place for Mary Alcestis's brother to be connected with! But he looked at Mrs. Lister and sat still. Her face was a little whiter, but it was unruffled. Now that he had been so unwise as to let her see this creature, the interview had better be conducted as she chose.
"Then I went to the house of the Professor of English and he knew nothing. If it hadn't been for the tavern, I should have despaired entirely. Will you"—Utterly, looking at Mrs. Lister decided that so Victorian a person could not possibly understand or appreciate her brother. "Will you tell me about Basil Everman? Will you not tell me everything?"
Mrs. Lister began in a smooth voice as though she were reciting a well-conned lesson. Not a quiver betrayed her spinning world.