“What the devil do you suppose I am to learn from an incompetent paste-and-scissors understrapper like that? He wants a good hiding, that’s what he wants, and I for one would have no objection to giving it him!”
“Well, it wasn’t me wrote it, Mr. Aix,” I said, “nor Ariadne!” He isn’t supposed to know that George farms out his reviews.
Mr. Aix laughed, and left off being cross. The odd thing was, that it had only just missed being Ariadne or me, for the book certainly came in for review. Most likely George wrote it, or else why didn’t he trouble to read it, when it was given him to read? It looks as if he were growing a little tiny bit of a conscience, for he knows he ought to have said to The Bittern editor, “Avaunt! Don’t tempt an author to review his friend’s book, when he knows he cannot speak well of it for so many reasons!” That is my idea of literary morality.
CHAPTER XI
GEORGE came back from his yachting tour with the Scillys very brown and cheerful, having collected enough sunshine for a new book, and Christina is typing it at his dictation.
George is a cranky dictator, and it takes her all her time to keep in touch with him. I have watched her at it. Sometimes he stops and can’t for the life of him find the right word, and I can tell by her eyes that she knows it, and is too polite to give it him; just the way one longs to help out a stutterer. But I have seen her put the word down out of her own head long before George has shouted it at her, as he does in the end. She picks and chooses, too, a little, for George is a tidy swearer, as the cabman said. I suppose he learned it in the high society he goes among! He does it all the time he is composing; it relieves the tension, he says, and she doesn’t mind. She manages him. George pretends he knows he is being managed, which shows that he doesn’t really think he is. I asked her once why she didn’t marry, but she said the profession of typewriting was not so binding as the other, for you could get down off your high stool if you wanted.
Christina always says rude things about epigrams and marriage. She is not very old, only thirty; but she says she has outgrown them both. Of course in this house epigrams are the same as bread-and-butter, hers and ours, for George pays her a good salary for typing those that he makes ready for print. As for epigrams, she says she can make them herself, and here are some I found written out in her handwriting on a china memorandum tablet. I expect she keeps a separate tablet for her remarks on Marriage.
1. Man cannot live by epigram alone.
2. Epigrams are like the paper-streamers they fling out of the boxes at a bal masqué at the Opera. They flat fall immediately afterwards.
3. An epigram is like the deadly Upas Tree, and blights everything in the shape of conversation that grows near it.