Maxwell laughed, too. "Yes, fancy Pinney getting hold of a fact like that and working it up with all his native delicacy in the Sunday edition of the Events!"
Pinney was a reporter of Maxwell's acquaintance, who stood to Louise for all that was most terrible in journalistic enterprise. "Don't!" she shrieked.
Maxwell went on. "He would have both our portraits in, and your father's and mother's, and my mother's; and your house on Commonwealth Avenue, and our meek mansion on Pinckney Street. He would make it a work of art, Pinney would, and he would believe that we were all secretly gratified with it, no matter how we pretended to writhe under it." He laughed and laughed, and then suddenly he stopped and was very grave.
"I know what you're thinking of now," said his wife.
"What?"
"Whether you couldn't use our affair in the play?"
"You're a witch! Yes, I was! I was thinking it wouldn't do."
"Stuff! It will do, and you must use it. Who would ever know it? And I shall not care how blackly you show me up. I deserve it. If I was the cause of your hating love so much that you failed with your lovers on the old lines, I certainly ought to be willing to be the means of your succeeding on lines that had never been tried before."
"Generous girl!" He bent over—he had not to bend far—and kissed her. Then he rose excitedly and began to walk the floor, with his hands in his pockets, and his head dropped forward. He broke into speech: "I could disguise it so that nobody would ever dream of it. I'll just take a hint from ourselves. How would it do to have had the girl actually reject him? It never came to that with us; and instead of his being a howling outside swell that was rather condescending to her, suppose I have him some sort of subordinate in her father's business? It doesn't matter much what; it's easy to arrange such a detail. She could be in love with him all the time, without even knowing it herself, or, at least, not knowing it when he offers himself; and she could always be vaguely hoping or expecting that he would come to time again."
"That's what I did," said his wife, "and you hadn't offered yourself either."