"Now, be as honest as you asked me to be," he interrupted.
"Well, then, I suppose you are a man like—like other men."
"But there are many kinds of other men."
The young lady tried several times to make herself clearer, and then asked, with a very pathetic pout, that she might be permitted to proceed with her reading, as the hour was growing later. It was not a very important point, any way, she said.
"I cannot entirely agree with you," replied Archie. "If you are to be a writer of fiction, you should not consider any time wasted which informs you in reference to your fellow creatures. It is from them that you must draw your inspiration; it is their figures you must put, correctly or incorrectly, on your canvas. Don't understand me as dictating to you, my dear Miss Fern. I only wish, as long as you have referred to me, to know of what I am accused."
To this Miss Fern answered, with many pauses, that she had not intended to accuse her visitor of anything. And once more—with evident distress—she begged to be permitted to drop the matter and return to her reading.
"Very well," he assented, thinking he had annoyed her as much as was advisable for the present. "As they say in parliamentary bodies, we will lay the question on the table, from which it can be taken at some more fitting time. I am as anxious as you can be to get into Chapter II."
She read this chapter to the end, and paused a few seconds to see if he had any comments to make, but he shook his head without breaking silence, and she went on with the story. He pursued the same plan till the end of the fifth chapter.
"It is interesting, exciting and true," he remarked, referring to the closing scene. "And I cannot help feeling arise in my brain the question that Mr. Gouger put when he read it: How could a young, innocent girl like you depict that situation with such absolute fidelity."
He had come to the point with a vengeance. But to Miss Fern his manner was far more agreeable than if he had approached it by stealth, or in an insinuating way. She had anticipated something of the sort and had tried to prepare herself to meet it.