"There's the risk," she said, uneasily picturing the precious pages at the mercy of the New York transit services.
Anxious to escape the assiduities of the wife, if not of the husband, Janet gave reckless assurances of her devotion to the manuscript.
Mrs. Grey finally assented to the arrangement. Janet was to take the manuscript in sections and, if the scheme worked well, she might do all future typewriting for the playwright in the same way. She need come to the Greys' house only for the dictation.
"I hope Mr. Grey will be satisfied," Janet could not help saying, once the bundle of papers was safely tucked under her arm.
"I hope so," said Mrs. Grey meditatively. "But who can fathom the ways of the creative temperament—?"
She left an eloquent hiatus.
From which Janet inferred that the shortest way with that particular temperament was to let the explanation follow the act.
V
This bout with the green-eyed monster had taken place shortly before Claude's petulant flight to the Armstrong estate in Huntington. To Janet the whole affair was very ludicrous, and none the less so in that she had given Mrs. Grey little cause for anxiety.
Not for a moment had the newspaper acclaim of Howard Madison Grey imposed upon her. Having measured her own wits with the playwright's, she had formed an estimate of his talents which caused her to reject with contempt the fantastic eulogies of him in the press. She continued to see in Mr. Grey what she had always seen, namely, a decidedly middle-aged man with a bald head and a graceless figure, a man whose amorous pleasantries and elderly sentimentalism inspired her with the same distaste as the odor of stale tobacco smoke with which his person seemed to reek.