"Soul, if you like. It reflects quite wonderfully, the angles at which it finds itself with the world are so unusual. But I doubt her power, you know, of construction or cohesion, or anything of that kind."
"I don't," Janet returned confidently. "But talk to her about it, daddy; get her to show you what she's done—I never see a line till it's in print. And—I don't know anything about it, you know. Above all things, don't let her guess that I suggested it."
"I'll see what can be done," Mr. Cardiff returned, "though I profess myself faithless. Elfrida wasn't designed to please the public of the magazines—in England."
When Janet reflected afterward upon what had struck her as being odd about this remark of her father's, she found it was Elfrida's name. It seemed to have escaped him; he had never referred to her in that way before—which was a wonder, Janet assured herself, considering how constantly he heard it from her lips.
"How does the novel come on?" Mr. Cardiff asked before she went to bed that night. "When am I to be allowed to see the proofs?"
"I finished the nineteenth chapter yesterday," Janet answered, flushing. "It will only run to about twenty-three. It's a very little one, daddy."
"Still nobody in the secret but Lash and Black?"
"Not a soul I hope they're the right people," Janet said anxiously. "I haven't even told Elfrida," she added. "I want to surprise her with an early copy. She'll like it, I think. I like it pretty well myself. It has an effective leading idea."
Her father laughed, and threw her a line of Horace which she did not understand. "Don't let it take too much time from your other work," he warned her. "It's sure, you know, to be an arrant imitation of somebody, while in your other things you have never been anybody but yourself." He looked at her in a way that disarmed his words, and went back to his Revue Bleue.
"Dear old thing! You want to prepare me for anything, don't you? I wonder whom I've imitated! Hardy, I think, most of all—but then it's such a ludicrously far-away imitation! If there's nothing in the thing but that, it deserves to fall as flat as flat. But there is, daddy!"