“How about your novels? Have you got any more good plots on hand?”
The form of my question was partly affected by the nature of the drama before us, which foreshadowed, even in the first act, a mysterious secret, handed on through more than one generation of an ancient family.
Rupert coloured a little.
“Good plots!” he repeated. “I have just scores of them. It is not that part of it I am at a loss about. It is my style I am unhappy and dissatisfied with. There is something—I don’t know how to define it—stilted and priggish, I am afraid, that I am painfully conscious of and yet cannot throw off. I have often thought how it would help me to talk my work over with you, if it would not bore you dreadfully. Even to read some of my MS. Could you make up your mind to such a thing?”
I felt flattered, but a little surprised.
“Bore me; it certainly would not,” I replied. “But I am not the very least in the world a literary person.”
“No,” said Rupert eagerly, quite unconscious of anything uncomplimentary in what he was saying. “I know you are not, and that is just what I like. Your feeling—your intuitive perception is so fresh and natural!”
I could scarcely suppress a smile; the dear fellow’s way of expressing himself vivâ voce, though he was quite unconscious of it, certainly laid him open to some extent to the charge of “stiltedness”—“priggish” I could not bear to call him, he was so genuine and really modest; the adjective “quaint” seemed to me to suit him better than any other.
“I should like very much to read some of your stories or sketches,” I said, “or better still, you might read them to me, and then we could discuss them a little as we go on.”
Then, for the time being, our conversation stopped but by the end of the next act—there were only three in all, as far as I remember—my interest in Rupert’s confidences had been increased by that of the drama before us.