"Only two others," she said apologetically. "You see I have only been in literature six months and I only write straight from the heart."
"Yes, indeed!" he said. "You wear your heart upon your leaves."
Jealous as he was of her readers, he felt that there was balm in Gilead. She was not a hack-writer, turning out books for the market of malice aforethought; not the complex being he had figured in the first moment of consternation, the literary quack with finger on the pulse of the public. She did but write as the birds carolled—not the slave, but the genius of the midnight lamp.
"But I must not wear my heart out," she replied, laughingly. "So I came down here for a month to get fresh material. I am writing a novel of Cornish peasant life—I want to photograph the people with all their lights and shades, all their faiths and superstitions, all their ways of speech and thought—the first thorough study ever made of a fast-fading phase of Old English life. You see, I didn't know what to do; I feared the public would be tired of my sailor-stories and I thought I'd locate my next story on land. Accident determined its environment. I learnt, by chance, that we had some poor relatives in Trepolpen, whom my people had dropped, and so I thought I'd pick them up again, and turn them into 'copy,' and I welcomed the opportunity of making at the same time the acquaintance of the sea, which, as I think I told you, I have never seen before. You see I was poor myself till The Cherub That Sits Up Aloft showered down the gold, and, being a Cockney, had never been able to afford a trip to the seaside."
"My poor Ellaline!" he said, kissing her candid lips. She was such an inveterate truth-teller that he could only respect and admire and adore—though she fell from heaven. Her candor infected him. He felt an overwhelming paroxysm of veracity.
The mask could be dropped now. Did she not love John Beveridge?
"Now I see why you rave so over literary people!" he said. "You are dipped in ink yourself."
"Yes," she said with a happy smile, "there is nobody I admire so much as our great writers."
"But you would not love me more, if I were a great writer?" he said anxiously.
"No, certainly not. I couldn't," she said decisively.