He thumped the desk. “But it sells, Miss Mannering, it sells. Did you know that?” He leant back in his chair in one of the attitudes he took when he was scoring heavily, thumbs in his waistcoat arm-holes.
“It’s the most popular series of cheap novels on the market. See any bookstall, if you doubt me.” He paused for her apology.
Effle did not apologize. “That does not alter my opinion of it,” she said coolly. “A public danger isn’t less dangerous because it’s large. I’m afraid I can believe that there are no depths to which it is impossible to degrade the public taste, but that does not make me like any the better a series which degrades it.”
Now a child is a child. It may be deformed, and its begetter may in clairvoyant moments have acknowledged the deformity to himself, but he resents its being pointed out to him. Sam was the father of his series.
“I say!” he protested. “That’s nasty.”
“It’s a nasty series,” she said hardily. “You are proud of it because it sells when you ought to be ashamed of it because it’s bad.” Somehow she had to say it. She couldn’t hedge from what she saw as truth, even though she expected truth to hurt him and to be hurt in return. But Sam wonderfully controlled himself. Emphatically, he was forgetting that she was a typist. He remembered that she was Effie.
He addressed the ceiling. “The fact is,” he mourned, “that women do not understand business. Even business women don’t. Even you don’t.”
Mentally she thanked him for his “even you.” It seemed to her a good place to end the matter for that morning. She still distrusted her manners, and not, she thought, without reason.
“Consequently,” she told him quietly, “my opinion cannot matter,” and moved as if to go to her typewriter.
He held her to her seat. “That is to beg the question,” he replied, “and we were to have it out.”