"Charles!" said his relative and secretary, speaking for the first time in ten minutes, a long silence for him—"I'll thank you for your attention a moment."
"Certainly, Judge," said Charles Garrott, with that alacrity with which a true writer habitually welcomes an interruption.
"Here, near the end of this story—passage I can't for the life of me.... Here! Seems to go like this: 'Let a man,' cried Dionysius, cracking walnuts with a sort of splendid sadness, 'but free his eyes from the magic of sex, and mask my words'—no!—let's see—'mark my words, Bishop, he shall see strange truths.'"
There was a pause.
"Mistake somewhere!" said the gentleman at the typewriter, with a chuckle. "Well, what's what?"
"No, that's right, I believe. Why, what's the matter with it?"
"Why!—there's no sense in it!"
"Oh—it's advanced talk, you know. Modern, epigrammatic stuff, you might call it."
"Conceding that, here's the bit about the nuts. That's where the mistake is, I claim. Let me see—'cracking walnuts with a sort of splendid sadness.' Good gad,—that can't be right, Charles! 'Sober sadness,' 'sorrowful sadness'—something of that sort you meant, eh?"
The secretary had swung about suddenly, revealing a face almost startlingly handsome, fine-cut as a cameo, pink and white as a professional beauty's, and topped with a magnificent crown of snow-white hair.