Maxwell frowned, as he always did when he became earnest, and said with a little sigh, "He must be passive, negative, as I said; you must simply feel that he is good, and that she will be safe with him, after the worst has happened to her father. And I must keep the interest of the love-business light, without letting it become farcical. I must get charm, all I can, into her character. You won't mind my getting the charm all from you?"
"Oh, Brice, what sweet things you say to me! I wish everybody could know how divine you are."
"The women would all be making love to me, and I should hate that. One is quite enough."
"Am I quite enough?" she entreated.
"You have been up to the present time."
"And do you think I shall always be?" She slid from her chair to her knees on the floor beside him, where he sat at his desk, and put her arms round him.
He did not seem to know it. "Look here, Louise, I have got to connect this love-business with the main action of the play, somehow. It won't do simply to have it an episode. How would it do to have Atland know all the time that Haxard has killed Greenshaw, and be keeping it from Salome, while she is betraying her love for him?"
"Wouldn't that be rather tawdry?" Louise let her arms slip down to her side, and looked up at him, as she knelt.
"Yes, it would," he owned.
He looked very unhappy about it, and she rose to her feet, as if to give it more serious attention. "Brice, I want your play to be thoroughly honest and true from beginning to end, and not to have any sort of catchpenny effectivism in it. You have planned it so nobly that I can't bear to have you lower the standard the least bit; and I think the honest and true way is to let the love-business be a pleasant fact in the case, as it might very well be. Those things do keep going on in life alongside of the greatest misery, the greatest unhappiness."