I only alluded,” said Voyt, “to the tremendous conscience of your sex. It s more than mihe can keep up with. You take everything too hard. But if you can`t read the novel of British and American manufacture, heaven knows I`m at one with you. It seems really to show our sense of life as the sense of puppies and kittens.”
“Well,” Maud more patiently returned, “I`m told all sorts of people are now doing wonderful things; but somehow I remain outside.” “Ah, it`s they, it`s our poor twinges and twaddle`s who remain outside. They pick up a living in the street. And who indeed would want them in?”
Mrs. Blessingbourne seemed unable to say, and yet at the same time to have her idea. The subject, in truth, she evidently found, was not so easy to handle. “People lend me things, and I try; but at the end of fifty pages”
“There you are! Yes heaven help us!”
“But what I mean,” she went on, “isn`t that I don`t get woefully weary of the eternal French thing. What`s their sense of life?”
“Ah, voila/” Mrs. Dyott softly sounded.
`Oh, but it is one; you can make it out,” Voyt promptly declared. `They do what they feel, and they feel more things than we. They strike so many more notes, and with so different a hand. When it comes to any account of a relation, say, between a man and a woman mean an intimate or a curious or a suggestive one where are we compared to them?
Doubtless Tell
They don`t exhaust the subject, no doubt,” he admitted; “but we don`t touch it, don`t even skim it. It`s as if we denied its existence, its possibility. You`ll doubtless tell me, however, he went oh, “that as all such relations are for us, at the most, much simpler, we can only have all round less to say about them.”
She met this imputation with the quickest amusement. “I beg your pardon. I don`t,,think I shall tell you anything of the sort. I don`t know that I even agree with your premise.”
“About such relations?” He looked agreeably surprised. “You think we make them larger? or subtler?”
Mrs. Blessingbourne leaned back, not looking, like Mrs. Dyott, at the fire, but at the ceiling. “I don`t know what I think.”
“It`s not that she doesn`t know,” Mrs. Dyott remarked. “It`s only (hat she doesn`t say.”
But Voyt had this time no eye for their hostess. For a moment he watched Maud. “It sticks out of you, you know, that you`ve yourself written something. Haven`t you and published? I`ve a notion I could read you.”
“When I do publish,” she said without moving, “you`ll be the last one I shall tell. I have” she went on, “a lovely subject, but it would take an amount of treatment!”
“Tell us then at least what it is.”
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