Maxwell stopped, with an air of discomfiture and disappointment. "You wouldn't like me to use that point, then?"
"What a simpleton! Of course I should! I shouldn't care if all the world knew it."
"Ah, well, we won't give it to Pinney, anyway; but I really think it could be done without involving our own facts. I should naturally work farther and farther away from them when the thing got to spinning. Just take a little color from them now and then. I might have him hating her all the way through, or, supposing he hated her, and yet doing all sorts of nice little things, and noble big things for her, till it came out about her father's crime, and then—" He stopped again with a certain air of distaste.
"That would be rather romantic, wouldn't it?" his wife asked.
"That was what I was thinking," he answered. "It would be confoundedly romantic."
"Well, I'll tell you," said Louise; "you could have them squabbling all the way through, and doing hateful things to one another."
"That would give it the cast of comedy."
"Well?"
"And that wouldn't do either."
"Not if it led up to the pathos and prettiness of their reconciliation in the end? Shakespeare mixes the comic and the tragic all through!"