“Not more than other people. Well, we will have it so. And not ambitious.”
“No, I think not.”
“You may thank God for that,” said John Craik, half to himself. “An ambitious woman is not a pleasant person.”
There was a little pause, during which John Craik rubbed his chin reflectively with his bony fingers.
“And now,” he said, “that I know something about you, I will tell you why I asked you to be good enough to come and see me. To begin with, I am an old man; you can see that for yourself. I am a martyr to rheumatism, and I frequently suffer from asthma, otherwise I should have done myself the pleasure of calling on you. I wanted to see you, because lady authors are uncertain creatures. A large majority of them have nothing better to do, and therefore write. Others do not care for the money, but they do most decidedly for the renown. The nudge and whisper of society is nectar to them. Others again are brilliant in flashes and dull in long periods. Few, very few are content to work with their pen as their poorer sisters are forced to work with their needles. In that lies the secret of the more permanent success of men journalists and men authors. The journalism and the authorship are not the men, but merely the business of their lives. Now will you be content to work hard and steadily without any great hope of renown--to work, in fact, anonymously for a small but certain income?”
“Yes,” answered Eve, without hesitation.
Craik nodded his head gravely and thoughtfully. He was too deeply experienced to fall into the error of thinking that Eve was different from other women. He did not for a moment imagine that he had secured in her a permanent subscriber to the Commentator--possibly he did not want her as such. He was merely doing a good deed--no new thing to him, although his right hand hardly knew what his left was doing. He liked Eve, he admired her, and was interested in her. Cipriani de Lloseta he was deeply interested in, and he knew, with the keen instinct of the novelist, that he was being drawn into one of those romances of real life which exists in the matter-of-fact nineteenth century atmosphere that we breathe.
So Eve Challoner left John Craik’s office an independent woman for the time being, and the charity was so deeply hidden that her ever-combative pride had failed to detect it.
CHAPTER X. THE CURTAIN LOWERS.
The shadow, cloaked from head to foot,
Who keeps the keys of all the creeds.