“I hope every one will be allowed to read it, even young girls,” she went on.
“Ah—” Caracal interrupted.
“Good!” Ethel said, “why should unpleasant things be written? Very dirty things some authors write, so I hear it said. I don’t understand this fouling of one’s own nest.”
Caracal hid his chagrin. To him a novel for the “young person”—a “proper” novel—was the lowest term of contempt. No, his would not be a rose-colored romance; it would be something that had been lived, thrilling with human passion, bleeding and fierce, even if it smelled of the stable and dung-hill—ah!—and he turned his Mephistophelian eye-glass toward the horizon.
A writer for young persons! The indignation which dictated his verses to Juvenal made Caracal find a title for his romance. “Let’s see,” he thought. “In fact, what title shall I give it? It must be something suggestive. For the city I have ‘The House of Glass’; would ‘The Pigsty’ do for the country? No, they’d say it was a treatise on breeding. ‘The Rose on the Dung-Hill’? No, they’d say it was poetry. ‘Dung-Hill’ alone is too short. ‘Worms from the Dung-Hill’—that’s the thing! comparing the country to a vast manure-heap with worms crawling through it.”
Secretly satisfied with this stroke of his genius, Caracal rubbed his hands.
As they drew near the town, the houses, scattered at first and amid gardens, became more numerous. The camping-party now jolted over the “King’s Pavement.” At a distance, above the low roofs, the spires of a church were seen. All at once they came out in the place where a few days before, through the blinds, when the sun-fountain marked four o’clock, the Grojeans had watched their passing by.
“The Grojean house?” A person standing near answered their inquiry: “It is the great doorway beyond there opening on the place.”
Brrr! and the auto was in front of the house.
There was a great door, studded with big iron nails, and a little wicket, with a grating in front of it, opening in the thickness of the wood. The front of the house, smooth and with drawn blinds, had a venerable look. The stroke of the knocker resounded long, as if re-echoing through an empty house. A moment passed.