Margery was waiting for him when he rang the bell: he guessed it gratefully, and she confirmed it.
"Of course," she said, with the bewitching little grimace which could be made to mean so much or so little. "Isn't this your afternoon? Why shouldn't I be waiting for you?" Then, with a swiftly sympathetic glance for the pale face and the tired eyes: "You've been overworking again. Let's sit out here on the porch where we can have what little air there is. There must be a storm brewing; it's positively breathless in the house."
Griswold was glad enough to acquiesce; glad and restfully happy and mildly intoxicated with her beauty and the loving rudeness with which she pushed him into the easiest of the great lounging chairs and took the sheaf of manuscript away from him, declaring that she meant to read it herself.
"It will wear you out," he objected, fishing for the denial which would give the precious fillip to the craftsman vanity.
The denial came promptly.
"Foolish!" she said; "as if anything you have written could make anybody tired!" And then, with the mocking after-touch he had come to know so well, and to look for: "Is that what you wanted me to say?"
"You are the spice of life and your name should have been Variety," he countered feebly. "But I warn you beforehand: there is a frightful lot of it. I have rewritten it from the beginning."
"So much the better," she affirmed. "You've been doling it out to me in little morsels, and I've been aching to get it all at one bite." And she began to read.
It was the first time he had had any of his own work read to him, and the experience was a pure luxury; at once the keenest and the most sensuous enjoyment he had ever known. Marvelling, as he was always moved to marvel, at her bright mind and clever wit and clear insight, he was driven to the superlatives again to find words to describe her reading. Artistically, and as with the gifted sympathy of a born actress, she seemed able to breathe the very atmosphere of the story. None of his subtle nuances were lost; there was never an emphasis misplaced. Better still, the impersonation was perfect. By turns she became himself, Joan, Fidelia, Fleming, or one of the subsidiary characters, speaking the parts, rather than reading them, with such a sure apprehension of his meaning that he could almost fancy that she was reading from his mind instead of following the manuscript.
When it was over; and he could not tell whether the interval should be measured by minutes or hours; the return to the realities—the hot afternoon, the tree-shaded veranda, the lake dimpling like a sheet of molten metal under the sun-glare—was almost painful.