Letty was now engaged in a general clearing-up and adjustment of the circumstances of her novelette. Mavice and Geoffrey must be brought together; and the heroine must have occasion to vow, with brimming eyes: “Love you though you are poor, Geoffrey?—I would love you if you came to me scorned by the whole world,—old and ugly and in rags. Geoffrey, you believe me, don’t you?” Then his great speech, beginning: “Oh, my darling, how could I ever doubt that your love would stand the test....” Letty scribbled the subsequent scene, her cheeks aflame, her fingers trembling so that it was a matter of difficulty to guide the pencil. One day, yes, one day, Sebastian would come to her, and say: “Oh, my darling, how could I ever doubt...?”
She had never before experienced the fascination of setting on paper, fragments of her own life, of glorifying characters with whom she had actually come in contact. To be sure, Luke had needed a little doctoring before he was altogether fit to take his place as Cyril Derincourt; but Sebastian accorded so perfectly with the Lord Geoffrey, that Letty was able to derive more voluptuous pleasure from the impassioned duets of her fancy, than ever from those actually enacted. Sebastian in the flesh was sometimes a little too fervent, too realistic even, for timid girlhood; or else incomprehensibly remote; but Geoffrey never by any chance made a remark that Mavice could not entirely understand. So Letty wrote with her heart, unhampered by literary standards, literary judgment; knowing naught of those over-intellectualized circles wherein Geoffrey and Mavice, Jasper and Cyril, and the alluring adventuress Esmée de Courcy (lately added), would meet with laughter and contempt. Letty wrote on, her evenings stabbed through and through by this secret excitement,—till, reading over the completed story, it struck her, with happy surprise, as not a whit less convincing or enthralling than all those other tales which had fed her imagination since flapper days: the “White Heather” Novelette Series; the “Silver Chimes” Complete Novel, published every Tuesday; the Myrtle Library; the Pink-and-Blue Boudoir Supplement; fiction in coloured paper covers, stacked, crumpled and torn, behind her bed-valance.
“I wonder,” brooded Letty, as she affixed a wobbling signature to the manuscript, “if Sebastian would be pleased to see me in print....”
To her, the be-all and end-all of literature was to “get into print”; written stuff was of absolutely no value otherwise. This secret of hers was swelling rather too big to be borne alone; Violet Baker was, under many vows, admitted to Letty’s confidence. Violet was shorthand-typist to a firm of solicitors, and volunteered to type, in her spare moments, “To Test Her Love,” which she considered a veritable masterpiece.
“What made you think of it, I don’t know?”—And on this point Letty continued to keep silence. Her sole fear was that her achievement would mysteriously rob her of feminine charm; place her in the same category as those “clever girls,” “gifted women,” “the kind men don’t like.” In which case, Letty decided, her talent should at once, definitely, and for ever, be abandoned.
Finally, after much deliberation of choice, the type-script was dispatched to the Editress of “Silver Chimes.” After a little delay, came a letter offering five guineas for full and complete rights in the fortunes of Geoffrey, Mavice, Cyril, Esmée, and Jasper.
“That means they’re going to print it!” Letty flew across the road to Violet Baker.
“Vi, they’re going to print it!”
Her tidings were not received with the acclamation she expected. “Oh, everything’s all right for you,” came muffled from the depths of a damp pocket-handkerchief.