"You floated René Dax."
"But he is a genius," Madame St. Leger remarked quietly.
"Yes," Adrian asserted, "there could be no doubt about his value from the first. He is extraordinary."
"He is extraordinarily perverted," cried Miss Beauchamp.
"I am much attached to M. René Dax." Madame St. Leger spoke deliberately; and a little silence followed, as when people listen, almost anxiously, to the sound of a pebble dropped into a well, trying to hear it touch bottom. Miss Beauchamp was the first to break it. She did so laughing.
"In that case, ma toute belle, you also are perverse, though I trust not yet perverted. It amounts to this, then," she continued, pulling her long gloves up her thin arms: "I am to dispose of poor Byewater, shatter his hopes, crush his ambitions, tell him, in short, that he won't do. Just Heaven, you who have arrived, how soon you become cruel!" She looked from the handsome black-bearded young man to the beautiful enigmatic young woman, and her witty, accentuated face bore a singular expression. "Good-by, charming Gabrielle," she said. "Forgive me if I have been tedious, for truly I am devotedly fond of you. And good-by to you, Mr. Savage. Yes! I go to dispose of the ill-fated Byewater. But ah! ah! if you only knew all I have done this afternoon, or tried to do, to serve you!"
Whereupon Adrian, smitten by sudden apprehension of deep and possibly dangerous issues, followed her to the door, crying eagerly:
"Wait, I implore you, dear Mademoiselle. Do not be too precipitate in disposing of Byewater. I may have underrated the worth of his articles. I will re-read, I will reconsider. Nothing presses. I have to leave Paris for a week or two. Let the matter rest till my return. I may find it possible, after all, to accept them."
Then, the door closed, he came back and stood on the vacant space of rose-red carpet in the pleasant glow of the fire.
"She is a clever woman," he said, reflectively. "She has cornered me, and that is not quite fair—on the Review. For they constitute a veritable atrocity of dullness, those articles by her miserable little Byewater."