Mona Gurney broke down, and shed tears.
"My darling! my precious!" Wyman leapt to her side, and attempted ineffectually to console her. "What is it? What has the nasty man said to upset you? Don't you believe a word of it——"
"It's such a beautiful book!" she sobbed. "And I thought I was keeping the lamp of civilization trimmed and burning—I did, truly.... I said so every time I sat down at my desk. It's two hundred and twenty thousand words, and only five more chapters to write——"
"Two hundred and twenty thousand wur-r-rds, and not finished yet!" Campbell was aghast. "But what may be the theme of this—this paper-eating monstrosity, my dear?"
Mona broke away from Ran's cherishing arms, and sat up on her haunches with spasmodic fidelity to Patricia's simile of a wee furry creature about to beg: "Oh, it is, it is a lovely book!" screwing up her eyes and mouth in an ecstasy of remembrance. "It's all about the Wars of the Roses!"
A shout of laughter greeted the announcement.
"But what's wrong with this war, Mona?—what's wrong with it? Why be prehistoric?—drag up these far-fetched relics from the ruins of time, when the genuine article is in the next room, so to speak?"
"Because it's in this room—and a little too genuine," Mona explained. "I do agree with Graham in wanting to let the pudding get cold before I dig in my spoon—but I can't write quite inconsequent novels on heredity or la femme incomprise, either—-just at present. And I can't put out the lamp altogether, Graham; I can't! I can't!"
"Puddings and lamps ... surely one of the minor evils of the war is the abundance of bad metaphor to which it can give rise even in this picked assembly!"
Burnett enquired seriously: "Nothing amiss with the soil of Sussex, is there, Miss Gurney, that you should abandon it? We like you when you're agricultural ... you influenced me to start growing mignonette in a window-box, once."