Susy put her hand down to it, and moved the printed sheets about. She read the title page down to the last name on the imprint, and then she flung up her hands, crying:
“How lovely! how lovely! But it seems wonderful! How did it come into being? It looks like a real thing now that we see it printed. The copy that you wrote out in that disguised hand seemed somehow quite different from this. There is life in this. It feels warm, actually warm, Fanny. Oh, don’t you love it, dear?”
Fanny, the young mother, shook her head, but with no significance, so far as Susy could see.
“’Tis too late now,” said Edward gloomily, taking on himself the burden of interpreting that head-shake. “You are bound down to go on with it now. You should have thought of all this before.”
“What nonsense is this you are talking?” cried Susy, turning upon him almost indignantly; for his tone suggested an aspersion upon the offspring. “What do you say is too late now? Do you mean to say that there’s anything to be ashamed of in this? Cannot you see that she did not put her name to it? Who is there to know that it came from this house? The name of Burney nowhere appears on it.”
“That’s so much, at any rate,” said he.
“Do you mean to say that you don’t think it quite wonderful, Eddy?” cried Susy. “And getting twenty pounds for it—twenty pounds! And you say something about it being too late!”
“I only judged from the way Fanny shook her head,” said he.
“Oh, that was not what Fanny was thinking at all—now was it, Fanny?” said Susy encouragingly to her sister.
“I don’t know quite what I meant or what I mean even now,” replied Fanny. “It made me feel for the moment somehow as if I had appeared in a street full of people before I had quite finished dressing!”