Mrs. Walbridge shuddered. "Dear me, no. Not that she would understand it," she added slowly.
There was a pause and the young man watched the firelight playing over the hollowed, haggard face with the deeply-lined white brow, and the tired violet eyes. It came to him suddenly how very pretty she must have been in her youth—her youth, so long ago, and before he was born (he was twenty-six). And then she said slowly, in a hesitating voice:
"It's such a stupid book. It's so badly put together and the people aren't real."
If a six months' old baby had sat up in its cradle and quoted Plato to him the young journalist could not have been more surprised. That Violet Walbridge, of all people on earth, should criticise the construction of a novel by Bruce Collier! Bruce Collier, who was undoubtedly the head of the new school of writers, and about whom most serious critics wrote columns in the morning papers. He stared at her in frank, almost open-mouthed astonishment, and she went on without apparently noticing his emotion, and speaking modestly, but with a sureness that he had never observed in her before.
"You see, if Swithin Cleveland had been in the ruins that time—you know—he could not possibly have written that letter to Sophia."
"Why couldn't he?" stammered Wick.
For a few minutes he listened to her soft, rather unmodulated voice, as she unfolded her ideas to him, and then suddenly he jumped up and slapped his knee.
"By Jove," he shouted, "you're right, you're right, Mrs. Walbridge, and not one of them—the critics I mean—has seen it!"