“It isn’t that,” he ejaculated, too worried and depressed to heed her tone. “I’m doing bad work. It’s no use to pretend I’m not.” He threw himself moodily into a chair as he spoke.
“Then how do you account for the returned manuscripts?”
“Not the right sort of badness, I suppose,” he answered, with an attempt at a laugh.
“Can’t you ask your wife for the recipe?” she inquired, letting herself go now, with a sort of savage pleasure in her own foolishness.
Robert threw up his head sharply. “I thought we’d agreed to leave my wife’s name out of our discussions.” And then, as though the words were wrung from him, “What you say hasn’t even the merit of being true,” he added. “Her work is good.”
Philippa’s eyes grew even colder.
“What a pity I’m deficient in the literary sense,” she remarked.
“I begin to think it’s not the only sense in which you are deficient, Philippa,” he returned, with growing anger.
She shrugged her shoulders. “Really? Is politeness one of them, by any chance? If so, we ought to exercise mutual forbearance.”
“I was not thinking of politeness. Decency was what I meant.”