"She is very silent," he said.
"Mrs. Lennox is very talkative," I told him.
"What can I call it?" he asked, in an agony of impatience. "She has every beauty, every grace, except that of expression."
"The Dumb Belle?" The words escaped me and I immediately regretted them.
"No," he said, quite seriously, "she is not dumb, that is just the point. She talks, but she cannot express herself. Or rather, she has nothing to express. At least, I think she has nothing to express: or what she has got to express is not what we think it is. I imagine a story like Pygmalion and Galatea. Somebody waking her to life and then finding her quite different from what the stone image seemed to promise, from what it did promise. At any rate I have got my subject and I am extremely grateful. It is a wonderful subject."
"Henry James," I ventured.
"Ah, James," said Rudd, "yes, James, a wonderful intellect, but a critic, not a novelist. The French could do it. What would they have called it? La Princesse désenchantée, or La Belle revenue du Bois? You can't say that in English."
"Nor in French either," I thought to myself, but I said aloud, "Out of the Wood would suggest quite a different kind of book."
"A very different kind of book," said Rudd, quite gravely. "The kind of book that sells by the million."
Rudd then left me. He was enchanted with the idea of having something to write about. I felt that a good title for his novel would be Eurydice Half-regained, but I was diffident about suggesting a title to him, besides which I felt he would not like it. Miss Brandon, he would explain, was not like Eurydice, and if she was, she had forgotten her experiences beyond the Styx.