Then, partly to keep from annoying the poet again, partly because it's the thing a woman always does, I took out the letter and read it over once more.
"Coburn-Colt—Philadelphia!"
The paper was a creamy satin, the embossing severely correct, the typing so neat and businesslike that I could scarcely believe the letter was meant for me when I looked at the outside only.
"Wonder what 'Julien J. Dutweiler' would call a small fortune?" I muttered. "Five thousand dollars? Ten thousand dollars!—Good heavens, then mother could have all the crepe meteor gowns she wanted without my ever—ever having to marry Guilford Blake for her sake!"
But as I sat there thinking, grandfather took up the cudgels bravely—even though the people most concerned were Christies and not Moores.
"Think well, Grace! That 'best-selling' clause means not only Maine to California, but England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Berwick-on-the-Tweed!" he warned. "Everybody who had ever heard of either of these two unfortunate people will buy a copy of the book and read it to find out what really happened!"
"But the letters are hers!" Uncle Lancelot reminded him. "If people don't want posterity to know the truth about them they ought to confine themselves to wireless communications."
"And—what would your Aunt Patricia say?" grandfather kept on. "What would James Christie say? What would Lady Frances Webb say?"
Thinking is certainly a bad habit—especially when your time belongs to somebody else and you are not being paid to think! Nevertheless, I sat there all the afternoon, puzzling my brain, when my brain was not supposed to wake up and rub its eyes at all inside the Herald office. I was being paid to come there and write airy little nothings for the Herald's airy little readers, yet I added to my sin of indecision by absorbing time which wasn't mine.
"Of course the possession of these letters in a way connects you with greatness," grandfather would say once in a while, in a lenient, musing sort of way. "But I trust that you are not going to let this fly to your head. Anyway, as the family has always known, your Uncle James Christie didn't leave his letters and papers to his great-niece; he merely left them! True, she was very close to him in his last days and he had always loved and trusted her—"