Jaffery, looking very shy and uncomfortable, suggested a game of billiards.
To Barbara and myself awaiting our guests in the drawing-room before dinner, the first to come was Doria, whom we hadn't seen since lunch; an arresting figure in her low evening dress; you can imagine a Tanagra figure in black and white ivory. Her face, however, was a passion of excitement.
"It's wonderful," she cried. "More than wonderful. Even I didn't know till to-day what a great genius Adrian was. All these things he describes—he never saw them. He imagined, created. Oh, my God! If only he had lived to finish it." She put her two hands before her eyes and dashed them swiftly away—"Jaffery has done his best, poor fellow. But oh! the bridges he speaks of—they're so crude, so crude! I can see every one. The murder—you remember?"
It occurred in the first part of the novel. I had read it. Three or four splashes of blood on the page instead of ink and the thing was done. Admirable. The instinctive high light of the artist.
"I thought it one of the best things in the book," said I.
"Oh!" she waved a gesture of disgust. "How can you say so? It's horrible. It isn't Adrian. I can see the point where he left it to the imagination. Jaffery, with no imagination, has come in and spoiled it. And then the scene on the Barbary Coast of San Francisco, where Fenton finds Ellina Ray, the broken-down star of London musical comedy. Adrian never wrote it. It's the sort of claptrap he hated. He has often told me so. Jaffery thought it was necessary to explain Ellina in the next chapter, and so in his dull way, he stuck it in."
That scene also had I read. It was a little flaming cameo of a low dive on the Barbary Coast, and a presentation of the thing seen, somewhat journalistic, I admit—but such as very few journalists could give.
"That's pure Adrian," said I brazenly.
"It isn't. There are disgusting little details that only a man that had been there could have mentioned. Oh! do you suppose I don't know the difference between Adrian's work and that of a penny-a-liner like Jaffery?"
The door opened and Jaffery appeared. Doria went up to him and took him by the lapels of his dress coat.