He looked hard at her, with a puzzled air.
"It ought not to be. What these men are striving for, they would tell you, is to get life as it is. They seemed to me to ring true when I read them." Yet he faltered on the words. To what did they ring true, he could not help asking himself? To the falsity he had cherished through ten long years of his life, answered conscience. But he was stubborn: it was one thing for him to ridicule his late acquaintances, and quite another to listen to some one else doing the same; from sheer contrariety he grew warm in defence of the novels.
"But those books—you won't think me silly, Mr. Lomax? you are so much cleverer—they don't describe women, as I know them."
Kate, too, was holding her ground, despite a feeling that this argumentative being must know a hundred times as much as she did about the art of character-drawing.
Griff got up and leaned against the mantelshelf. He was nettled. It was all so true, he felt—and it was bitter to have to admit that this woman, whom he had vaguely patronized as affording a valuable model, should be able to tell him what it had taken him so long to learn.
"I—I thought they did," he said lamely.
"Of course, you know best. Only they seem to me either too good or too bad—and far too clever. There isn't one real heart-sob in all these books—and women, God knows, live by heart-sobs in real life."
She remembered herself at that, and flushed. It was too easy to forget how clever Mr. Lomax was, and she was surely a very silly woman. But Griff knew she was right; he said nothing for that very reason, because he felt so cross.
Then the mother came in, and smothered her surprise at finding the two of them chatting so snugly together, and gave Kate a hearty welcome.
"Mrs. Strangeways has been abusing my judgment of women," laughed Griff, his good temper restored.