She put her request at last very timidly to her new friend.
“Do you think he would give me an interview—just a very, very short one?”
But now Kate Kinross was perturbed.
“My dear girl,” she said (all women she liked were “dear girls” to Kate), “I simply dare not ask him. He has stood out against it so persistently all these five years. He simply hates publicity; he says all he asks is [p93] to do his work, to do it as he likes, and to go his own way as unmolested and as privately as a bricklayer does.”
“But just a very, very short one,” pleaded Miss Bibby. She went on to tell Kate about Thomas’s letter, the editor’s offer, this chance of a lifetime for herself.
Kate almost groaned.
“Five years have I kept them off him,” she said, “five whole years, and not one interviewer have I even allowed to get across the doorway! And you would have me plot against his peace like this!”
Miss Bibby urged no more, just sat still and swallowed heroically once or twice, and then said smilingly that it “didn’t matter at all.”
But Kate’s keen eyes were on her all the time. Something about this slender woman with the grey, half-startled eyes, and the soft mouth that quivered so easily, and the soft, thin cheek where the pink pulsed to and fro as rapidly as in a young girl’s, touched her curiously.
She stood up at last and put a hand on her visitor’s shoulder in a hearty, encouraging way.