"Go on with your argument, Grace," he urged patiently. He was always patient.
"I'm going!" I answered. "All day grandfather has been telling me what I already know—that the Coburn-Colt Company doesn't want those letters of James Christie's because they are literary, or beautiful, or historical, but simply and solely because they are bad! They'll make a good-seller because they're the thing the public demands right now. Lady Frances Webb was a married woman!"
"Nonsense," mother interrupted, with a blush. "The public doesn't demand bad things! There is merely a craze for intimate, biographical matter—told in the first person."
"I know," I admitted humbly. "This is what distinguishes a human from an inhuman document."
"The craze demands a simple straightforward narrative—" Guilford began, then hesitated.
"In literature this is the period of the great 'I Am,'" I broke in. "People want the secrets of a writer's soul, rather than the tricks of his vocabulary, I know."
"Well, good lord—you wouldn't be giving the twentieth century any more of these people's souls than they themselves gave to the early nineteenth," he argued scornfully. "She put his portrait into every book she ever wrote—and he annexed her face in the figure of every saint—and sinner—he painted!"
"Well, that was because they couldn't see any other faces," I defended.
"Bosh!"
"But Lady Frances Webb was a good woman," mother insisted weakly. "She had pre-Victorian ideas! She sent her lover across seas, because she felt that she must! Why, the publication of these letters would do good, not harm."