"She was. She and Julia and Rose were children together. But I'm not sure Julia speaks to her since The Parthian Arrow. She meant it for him all right, whether he meant his for her or not. Life's full of quiet humour, isn't it?"
I will abridge a little of my friend's liveliness. Indeed as she caught as it were out of the air something of my own mood, she dropped much of it herself. This was the substance of what she told me:
Derwent Rose had written a book called An Ape in Hell. I don't know, Derry never knew, I don't think anybody knows to this day, the real origin of the expression that formed its title; and if I were a syndic of one of these New Dictionaries I think I should frankly confess as much, instead of merely quoting other books as saying that "A woman who dies without bearing a child is said to lead an Ape in Hell." Had I written that book, and in my own way, I think the four corners of the earth would have heard of it; as Derwent Rose had written it, in his way, he had merely achieved a masterpiece for the reading of generations to come. Our contemporary agglomeration (if Mr Goddard is right) of ten and twelve years old intelligences had practically passed it over. Briefly, the book had to do with the merciless economic pressure that already, in 1910, made it difficult for people to marry in the freshness of their youth, and practically suicidal to have children. I cannot delay to say more of the book. I saw in it nothing but pity and beauty and tenderness and a savage and generous anger, and how anybody could have taken it in any other sense I could not imagine.
Yet one person had done so—a friend of his childhood, the author of The Parthian Arrow.
"One moment," I said when Madge arrived at this point. "There's one thing that isn't quite clear. His book came out in 1910. Hers only appeared quite lately."
"That's so," she admitted.
"But nobody brings out a rejoinder ten years after the event."
"Well—she did. Read the book. Another thing: she started her book immediately his appeared, in 1910."
"How do you know that?"
"Those sleeves her heroine wears went out in 1910," was her characteristic reply. "She never even took the trouble to bring them up to date."