"Rachel! What is it you are talking about? Look around here! I want to see you! Do you mean that you think of—of me like that—tell me?"
If Miss Fred could have seen them at that moment it would have done her heart good, for they really looked rather lover-like; each was unconscious of it, though their faces did not lack feeling. She drew her hand slowly away, and said, in that halting yet persistent way in which she spoke when very earnest yet not very sure of herself:
"You think me egotistical, I suppose, to criticise work that is beyond my own capabilities, but—it was you I meant."
"Well?"
His fingers closed over the arm of the chair instead of her hand. All his face was alight with feeling. Perhaps it was as well that her stubbornness kept her eyes from his; to most women they would not have been an aid to cool judgment.
"Well, there isn't anything more to say, is there?" she asked, smiling a little out at the snow. "It was the book that did it—made me feel like that about you; that your work is—well, surface work—skimmed over for pastime. But here and there are touches that show how much deeper and stronger the work you might produce if you were not either lazy or careless."
"You give one heroic treatment, and can be merciless. The story was written some time ago, and written under circumstances that—well, you see I do not sign my name to it, so I can't be very proud of it."
"Ah! that is it? Your judgment, I believe, is too good to be satisfied with it; I shouldn't waste breath speaking, if I was not sure of that. But you have the right to do work you can be proud of; and that is what you must do."
Rachel's way was such a decided way, that people generally accepted her "musts" as a matter of course. Stuart did the same, though evidently unused to the term; and her cool practicalities that were so surely noting his work, not himself, had the effect of checking that first impulse of his to touch her—to make her look at him. He felt more than ever that the girl was strange and changeable—not only in herself, but in her influence. He arose and walked across the floor a couple of times, but came back and stood beside her.
"You think I am not ambitious enough; and you are right, I suppose. I have never yet made up my mind whether it was worth my while to write, or whether it might not be more wise to spare the public."