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It's going to be worse than 'Diadems. I've just had my first quiet breakfast in two years time to read the papers and loaf. How I used to dread the sight of my letter-box! Now I sha'n't know I have one." He leaned over Vyse's chair, and the secretary handed him a letter. "Here's rather an exceptional one lady, evidently. I thought you might want to answer it yourself " "Exceptional?"
Betton, furious, glanced over his table to see if any of his own effects were missing one couldn't tell, with the company Vyse kept! and then dismissed the matter from his mind, with a vague sense of magnanimity in doing so. He felt himself exonerated by Vyse's conduct. The sense of magnanimity was still uppermost when the valet opened the door to announce "Mr.
He began to fancy there was a latent rancour, a kind of baffled sneer, under Vyse's manner; and he decided to return to the practice of having his mail brought straight to his room. In that way he could edit the letters before his secretary saw them.
But gradually he felt a desire to know what his secretary thought of the letters, and, above all, what he was saying in reply to them. And he resented acutely the possibility of Vyse's starting one of his clandestine correspondences with the girl in Florida.
Betton minded it a good deal more than he had expected, but not nearly as much as he minded Vyse's knowing it. That remained the central twinge in his diffused discomfort. And the problem of getting rid of his secretary once more engaged him. "If I ship him now he'll think it's because I'm ashamed to have him see that I'm not getting any more letters."
He remembered Vyse's tossing it down on his table with a gesture of despair when it came back from the last publisher. Betton, taking it up indifferently, had sat riveted till daylight. When he ended, the impression was so strong that he said to himself: "I'll tell Apthorn about it I'll go and see him to-morrow."
The sense of being held under the lens of Vyse's mute scrutiny became more and more exasperating. Betton, by this time, had squared his shoulders to the fact that "Abundance" was a failure with the public: a confessed and glaring failure. The press told him so openly, and his friends emphasized the fact by their circumlocutions and evasions.
He assumed that much, and he had no hesitation in discussing Lucy with her. Minnie was fortunately collecting ferns. She opened the discussion with: "We had much better let the matter drop." "I wonder." "It is of the highest importance that there should be no gossip in Summer Street. It would be DEATH to gossip about Mr. Vyse's dismissal at the present moment." Mr. Beebe raised his eyebrows.
But I'm still walking rather a narrow plank; and if I do your work well enough if I take your idea " Betton stared into the fire without answering. He knew next to nothing of Vyse's history, of the mischance or mis-management that had brought him, with his brains and his training, to so unlikely a pass.
Vyse's thin lips seemed to form a noiseless " Isn't it?" which they instantly transposed into the audibly reply: "I inferred from your advertisement that you want some one to relieve you in your literary work. Dictation, short-hand that kind of thing?" "Well, no: not that either. I type my own things. What I'm looking for is somebody who won't be above tackling my correspondence."
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