Eweretta’s heart was beating so wildly that she foolishly feared he might hear it. It was an absurd idea, but she thought it.
Philip’s voice, as he talked, was the old Philip’s, and not the voice which was hard and critical which she had noted when first she met him in her new character.
“It is very sad, tragic even, to have so much work destroyed,” she said, when she could command her voice.
She had sat down now, opposite to him, but at a distance from the fire.
He laughed softly.
“Yet I said I was not sorry,” he told her.
How exquisitely graceful she was! Just the same lines and curves which he had found so alluring in Eweretta.
“I have become self-centred and hard since—since Eweretta died,” he said. “If she had lived, I should not be the disagreeable brute I am. I put myself in that book, and frankly, Miss Le Breton, I did not find the picture pleasing on revision. You made me see it as it was.”
“What did I say?” she asked him.
“Is speech a necessity between some people?” he asked her.