Half truth as this was, it was more sincere than such confidences are apt to be.
'Your book is you, or a part of you,' said Mabel. 'It seems so absurd that you should be jealous of it.'
'I am,' he said. 'Not so much with others, but when I am with you it tortures me. When you show me any kindness I think, "She would not say that, she would not do this, if I were not the author of 'Illusion.' She honours the book, not you—only the book!"'
'How unjust!' said Mabel. She could not think it a perverted form of diseased vanity. He plainly undervalued his work himself, and its popularity was a real vexation to him. She could only be sorry for him.
'But I see proof of it in others every now and then,' continued Mark, 'people who do not connect me at first with "Cyril Ernstone." Only the other day some of them went so far as to apologise for having snubbed me "before they knew who I was." I don't complain of that, of course—I'm not such an idiot; but it does make me doubtful of the other extreme. And I cannot bear the doubt in your case!'
His eyes were raised pleadingly to hers. He seemed longing, and yet dreading, to speak more plainly. Mabel's heart beat quicker; there was a subtle, delicious flattery in such self-abasement before her of a man she admired so much. Would he say more then, or would he wait? As far as she knew her own mind, she hoped he would wait a little longer. She said nothing, being perhaps afraid of saying too much. 'Yet I know it will be so,' said Mark; 'the book will be forgotten with the next literary sensation, and I shall drop under with it. You will see me about less often, till one day you pass me in the street and wonder who I am, and if you ever met me at all.'
'I don't think I ever gave you the right to say that,' she said, wounded at his tone, 'and you ought to know that I should not do anything of the sort.'
'Will you tell me this,' he said, and his voice trembled with anxiety, 'if—if I had not written this book which was happy enough to give you some pleasure—if I had met you simply as Mark Ashburn, a man who had never written a line in his life, would you have been the same to me? Would you have felt even such interest in me as I like to think sometimes you do feel? Try to give me an answer.... You don't know how much it will mean to me.'
Mabel took refuge in the impersonal. 'Of course,' she said, 'one often likes a person one never saw very much for something he has done; but I think if you ever do meet him and then don't like him for himself, you dislike him all the more for disappointing you. It's a kind of reaction, I suppose.'
'Tell me this too,' Mark entreated, 'is—is that my case?'