Fennel and Rue | Page 6

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 your meaning. The thing's in the only shape we could possibly give it, and I am satisfied to leave it in Armiger's hands. I'm certain he will deal wisely with it-and kindly."
"Yes, I'm sure he'll deal kindly. I should be very unhappy if he didn't. He could easily deal more wisely, though, than she has."
Verrian chose not to follow his mother in this. "All is," he said, with finality, "I hope she'll never see that loathsome paragraph."
"Oh, very likely she won't," his mother consoled him.

III.
Only four days after he had seen Armiger, Verrian received an envelope covering a brief note to himself from the editor, a copy of the letter he had written to Verrian's unknown correspondent, and her answer in the original. Verrian was alone when the postman brought him this envelope, and he could indulge a certain passion for method by which he read its contents