Fennel and Rue | Page 6

and if she isn't the real thing, but merely a woman journalist
trying to work us for a 'story' in her Sunday edition, we shall hear no
more from her."
"I don't see anything to object to in your plan," Verrian said, upon
reflection. "She certainly can't complain of our being cautious."
"No, and she won't. I shall have to refer the matter to the house--"
"Oh, will you?"
"Why, certainly! I couldn't take a step like that without the approval of
the house."
"No," Verrian assented, and he made a note of the writer's address from
the letter. Then, after a moment spent in looking hard at the letter, he
gave it back to the editor and went abruptly away.

He had proof, the next morning, that the editor had acted promptly, at
least so far as regarded the house. The house had approved his plan, if
one could trust the romantic paragraph which Verrian found in his
paper at breakfast, exploiting the fact concerned as one of the
interesting evidences of the hold his serial had got with the magazine
readers. He recognized in the paragraph the touch of the good fellow
who prepared the weekly bulletins of the house, and offered the press
literary intelligence in a form ready for immediate use. The case was
fairly stated, but the privacy of the author's correspondent was perfectly
guarded; it was not even made known that she was a woman. Yet
Verrian felt, in reading the paragraph, a shock of guilty dismay, as if he
had betrayed a confidence reposed in him, and he handed the paper
across the table to his mother with rather a sick look.
After his return from the magazine office the day before, there had been
a good deal of talk between them about that girl. Mrs. Verrian had
agreed with him that no more interesting event could have happened to
an author, but she had tried to keep him from taking it too personally,
and from making himself mischievous illusions from it. She had since
slept upon her anxieties, with the effect of finding them more vivid at
waking, and she had been casting about for an opening to penetrate him
with them, when fortune put this paragraph in her way.
"Isn't it disgusting?" he asked. "I don't see how Armiger could let them
do it. I hope to heaven she'll never see it!"
His mother looked up from the paragraph and asked,
"Why?"
"What would she think of me?"
"I don't know. She might have expected something of the kind."
"How expect something of the kind? Am I one of the self-advertisers?"
"Well, she must have realized that she was doing rather a bold thing."
"Bold?"
"Venturesome," Mrs. Verrian compromised to the kindling anger in her
son's eyes.
"I don't understand you, mother. I thought you agreed with me about
the writer of that letter--her sincerity, simplicity."
"Sincerity, yes. But simplicity--Philip, a thoroughly single-minded girl
never wrote that letter. You can't feel such a thing as I do. A man
couldn't. You can paint the character of women, and you do it

wonderfully--but, after all, you can't know them as a woman does."
"You talk," he answered, a little sulkily, "as if you knew some harm of
the girl."
"No, my son, I know nothing about her, except that she is not single-
minded, and there is no harm in not being single-minded. A great many
single-minded women are fools, and some double-minded women are
good."
"Well, single-minded or double-minded, if she is what she says she is,
what motive on earth could she have in writing to me except the motive
she gives? You don't deny that she tells the truth about herself?"
"Don't I say that she is sincere? But a girl doesn't always know her own
motives, or all of them. She may have written to you because she
would like to begin a correspondence with an author. Or she may have
done it out of the love of excitement. Or for the sake of distraction, to
get away from herself and her gloomy forebodings."
"And should you blame her for that?"
"No, I shouldn't. I should pity her for it. But, all the same, I shouldn't
want you to be taken in by her."
"You think, then, she doesn't care anything about the story?"
"I think, very probably, she cares a great deal about it. She is a serious
person, intellectually at least, and it is a serious story. No wonder she
would like to know, at first hand, something about the man who wrote
it."
This flattered Verrian, but he would not allow its reasonableness. He
took a gulp of coffee before saying, uncandidly, "I can't make out what
you're driving at, mother. But, fortunately, there's no hurry about