“Oh, then,” he bubbled out, knowing that he was wrong and foolish, but helpless to refrain, “before I read those things, won’t you tell me—I should care more—I should like so much to know what you—I suppose I’ve no right to ask!”
He tried to make some show of decency about the matter, but in fact he had the heart to ask a dying man his opinion, in that literary passion which spares nothing, and is as protean as love itself in its disguises.
“I suppose,” she answered, “that I had no right to read it; I wasn’t asked to do it.”
“Oh, yes, you had. I’m very glad you did.”
“The opinions about it were so different that I couldn’t help looking at it, and then—I kept on,” she said.
“Were they so very different?” he asked, trembling with his author’s sensitiveness, while the implication of praise in her confession worked like a frenzied hope in his brain. “And you kept on? Then it interested you?”
She did not answer this question, but said: “None of them thought just alike about it. But you’ll see them”—
“No, no! Tell me what you thought of it yourself! Was there some part that seemed better than the rest?”
She hesitated. “No, I would rather not say. I oughtn’t to have told you I had read it.”
“You didn’t like it!”