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Updated: June 22, 2025
"I've got your seat, haven't I?" he said, rising and moving away from the table. Vyse, with a quick gleam of relief, slipped into the vacant chair, and began to stir about vaguely among the papers. "How's your father?" Betton asked from the hearth. "Oh, better better, thank you. He'll pull out of it." "But you had a sharp scare for a day or two?" "Yes it was touch and go when I got there."
But once there, Betton hardly knew how to frame his question, and blundered into an enquiry for a missing invitation. "There's a note a personal note I ought to have had this morning. Sure you haven't kept it back by mistake among the others?" Vyse laid down his pen. "The others? But I never keep back any." Betton had foreseen the answer.
He had found a savour even in the grosser evidences of popularity: the advertisements of his book, the daily shower of "clippings," the sense that, when he entered a restaurant or a theatre, people nudged each other and said "That's Betton." Yes, the publicity had been sweet to him at first.
The g's are all like corkscrews. And the same phrases keep recurring the Ann Arbor news-agent uses the same expressions as the President of the Girls' College at Euphorbia, Maine." Betton laughed. "Aren't the critics always groaning over the shrinkage of the national vocabulary? Of course we all use the same expressions." "Yes," said Vyse obstinately. "But how about using the same g's?"
Vyse made no comment on the change, and Betton was reduced to wondering whether his imperturbable composure were the mask of complete indifference or of a watchful jealousy.
THE deluge began punctually on the Thursday, and Vyse, arriving as punctually, had an impressive pile of letters to attack. Betton, on his way to the Park for a ride, came into the library, smoking the cigarette of indolence, to look over his secretary's shoulder. "How many of 'em? Twenty? Good Lord!
Another pause, while Vyse began to classify the letters. "And I suppose," Betton continued in a steady tone, "your anxiety made you forget your usual precautions whatever they were about this Florida correspondence, and before you'd had time to prevent it the Swazee post-office blundered?" Vyse lifted his head with a quick movement. "What do you mean?" he asked, pushing his chair back.
Betton had reverted only once to the subject to ask ironically, a day or two later: "Is Strett writing to me as much as ever?" and, on Vyse's replying with a neutral head-shake, had added with a laugh: "If you suspect him you might as well think I write the letters myself!"
Vyse looked slightly surprised. "I should be glad of the job," he then said. Betton began to feel a vague embarrassment. He had supposed that such a proposal would be instantly rejected. "It would be only for an hour or two a day if you're doing any writing of your own?" he threw out interrogatively. "No. I've given all that up. I'm in an office now business.
Unluckily the next day something unexpected turned up, and Betton forgot about Vyse and his manuscript. He continued to forget for a month, and then came a note from Vyse, who was ill, and wrote to ask what his friend had done. Betton did not like to say "I've done nothing," so he left the note unanswered, and vowed again: "I'll see Apthorn."
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