“I was reading one of the new books that came the other day, the deep grave ones you sent for. It is written by a deep grave German, and it is worked out in the deep grave German way. The whole purpose of it is to show that any woman in the life of any man is merely—an Incident. She may be this to him, she may be that to him; for a briefer time, for a greater time; but all along and in the end, at bottom, she is to him—an Incident.”
He did not take his eyes from hers and his smile slowly broadened.
“Were those the discords?” he asked gently.
She did not reply.
He turned in his chair and looking over his shoulder at her, he raised his arm and drew the point of his pen across the backs of a stack of magazines on top of his desk.
“Here is a work,” he said, “not written by a German or by any other man, but by a woman whose race I do not know: here is a work the sole purpose of which is to prove that any man is merely an Incident in the life of any woman. He may be this to her, he may be that to her; for a briefer time, for a greater time; but all along and in the end, beneath everything else, he is to her—an Incident.”
He turned and confronted her, not without a gleam of humor in his eyes.
“That did not trouble me,” he said tenderly. “Those were not discords to me.”
Her eyes rested on his face with inscrutable searching. She made no comment.
His own face grew grave. After a moment of debate with himself as to whether he should be forced to do a thing he would rather not do, he turned in his chair and laid down his pen as though separating himself from his work. Then he said, in a tone that ended playfulness: