Subtlety, diabolic or divine, was given me. I went at it like a man inspired.
"They won't do him justice. They'll do him harm."
"Harm?" She breathed it with an audible fright.
"Very great harm. They give a wrong impression, an impression of—of——"
I left it to her. It sank in. She pondered it.
"You mean," she said at last, "the things he says about himself?"
"Precisely. The things he says about himself. I doubt if he really intended them all for publication."
"It's not the things he says about himself so much," she said. "We could leave some of them out. It's what Grevill might have said about him."
That was awful; but it helped me; it showed me where to plant the blow that would do for her, poor lamb.
"My dear child," I said (I was very gentle, now that I had come to it, to my butcher's work), "that's what I want you to realize. He'll—he'll say what he can, of course; but he can't say very much. There—there isn't really very much to say."