"
"Of course not; but you won't get them to think so."
"They may think what they please."
He looked at her doubtfully.
"It's for you to decide."
"We'll stay," she repeated.
Gannett, before they met, had made himself known as a successful writer of
short stories and of a novel which had achieved the distinction of being
widely discussed. The reviewers called him "promising," and Lydia now
accused herself of having too long interfered with the fulfilment of his
promise. There was a special irony in the fact, since his passionate
assurances that only the stimulus of her companionship could bring out his
latent faculty had almost given the dignity of a "vocation" to her course:
there had been moments when she had felt unable to assume, before
posterity, the responsibility of thwarting his career. And, after all, he
had not written a line since they had been together: his first desire to
write had come from renewed contact with the world! Was it all a mistake
then? Must the most intelligent choice work more disastrously than the
blundering combinations of chance? Or was there a still more humiliating
answer to her perplexities? His sudden impulse of activity so exactly
coincided with her own wish to withdraw, for a time, from the range of his
observation, that she wondered if he too were not seeking sanctuary from
intolerable problems.
"You must begin to-morrow!" she cried, hiding a tremor under the laugh
with which she added, "I wonder if there's any ink in the inkstand?"
* * * * *
Whatever else they had at the Hotel Bellosguardo, they had, as Miss
Pinsent said, "a certain tone.
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