For long I had known that Mary contemplated the writing of a book, my informant being David, who, because I have published a little volume on Military tactics, and am preparing a larger one on the same subject (which I shall never finish), likes to watch my methods of composition, how I dip, and so on, his desire being to help her. He may have done this on his own initiative, but it is also quite possible that in her desperation she urged him to it; he certainly implied that she had taken to book-writing because it must be easy if I could do it. She also informed him (very inconsiderately), that I did not print my books myself, and this lowered me in the eyes of David, for it was for the printing he had admired me and boasted of me in the Gardens.
“I suppose you didn't make the boxes neither, nor yet the labels,” he said to me in the voice of one shorn of belief in everything.
I should say here that my literary labours are abstruse, the token whereof is many rows of boxes nailed against my walls, each labelled with a letter of the alphabet. When I take a note in A, I drop its into the A box, and so on, much to the satisfaction of David, who likes to drop them in for me. I had now to admit that Wheeler & Gibb made the boxes.
“But I made the labels myself, David.”
“They are not so well made as the boxes,” he replied.
Thus I have reason to wish ill to Mary's work of imagination, as I presumed it to be, and I said to him with easy brutality, “Tell her about the boxes, David, and that no one can begin a book until they are all full. That will frighten her.”
Soon thereafter he announced to me that she had got a box.
“One box!” I said with a sneer.
“She made it herself,” retorted David hotly.
I got little real information from him about the work, partly because David loses his footing when he descends to the practical, and perhaps still more because he found me unsympathetic. But when he blurted out the title, “The Little White Bird,” I was like one who had read the book to its last page. I knew at once that the white bird was the little daughter Mary would fain have had. Somehow I had always known that she would like to have a little daughter, she was that kind of woman, and so long as she had the modesty to see that she could not have one, I sympathised with her deeply, whatever I may have said about her book to David.