“Yes, yes,” murmured Miss Bibby, looking up with bright eyes from some writing she [p120] was engaged upon, “just this once, dear, but be careful not to——”
But Muffie had sprung away again, and what she had to avoid with the cloth, whether tearing it into holes, or getting mud on it, or losing it, or wetting it, she did not wait to hear. It is possible Miss Bibby did not even finish the sentence—her eyes looked absent-minded enough for such a lapse.
Muffie went gleefully back to Robinson Island, the art-green serge trailing behind her.
“We can have it, we can have it!” she announced gleefully, “only we’re to be careful not to—come on, fasten it on to the sticks, Paul.”
Miss Bibby had reached the chronicle of Hugh Kinross’s “endearing little eccentricities.”
A small pile of neatly written sheets lay to the right of her. In front of her lay more sheets, scored through, corrected, polished, until Flaubert himself would have been satisfied with the labour bestowed.
She had worked steadily through the night, the silent night in the hills, her lamp the only household eye still open in miles of black slumbering country.
At three o’clock she had flung herself down and snatched a few hours’ sleep, but by seven she was up again, the same quivering excitement [p121] in her veins. A little more polishing, then a fair copy in her very neatest hand, and she might bear it up to the four o’clock post, and send it flying forward to the Evening Mail.
The envelope that would hold it would hold also her destiny, she told herself. This was the most important crisis of her life; she had travelled nearly forty years—thirty-six to be exact—along a road of life, not rough and stony as many a road is, but just dull and level and monotonous and dusty, as are so many excellent highways. But now she stood at two crossroads, and saw stretching before her one in no wise different from that she had traversed so long, and the other a glittering tempting path springing joyously up a high hill, on the top of which, in the shade of laurel trees, sat at ease the whole goodly company of great authors. She fancied they were beckoning to her; she heard sweet voices from them throughout that feverish night—“Come up higher, Agnes Bibby,” they were saying.
The interview was the first step along this second path. The story, already promised space for, would be the second. And then, from out the bitter gloom of the trunk, the novels would emerge, one after the other, the world graciously holding out its hand for them.