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The hands I held shook, but something (perhaps a shame for having evaded the knees business) made me tighten my hold and bestow upon her also a reassuring smile. She looked at me for a moment, and then, suddenly and noiselessly, tears rose and rolled down her cheeks. I dropped her hands and retreated. I had not thought her tearful: on the contrary, her voice and face had seemed rigidly controlled. But now here she was bending herself over the side of the chair with her head resting on her arms, not sobbing aloud, but her whole frame shaken by the strength of her emotion. I rushed for a glass of wine; I pressed her to take it. I did not quite know what to do, but, putting myself in her place, I decided to praise the drama; and praise it I did. I do not know when I have used so many adjectives. She raised her head and began to wipe her eyes.

“Do take the wine,” I said, interrupting myself in my cataract of language.

“I dare not,” she answered; then added humbly, “that is, unless you have a biscuit here or a bit of bread.”

I found some biscuit; she ate two, and then slowly drank the wine, while I resumed my verbal Niagara. Under its influence–and that of the wine too, perhaps–she began to show new life. It was not that she looked radiant–she could not–but simply that she looked warm. I now perceived what had been the principal discomfort of her appearance heretofore: it was that she had looked all the time as if suffering from cold.

At last I could think of nothing more to say, and stopped. I really admired the drama, but I thought I had exerted myself sufficiently as an anti-hysteric, and that adjectives enough, for the present at least, had been administered. She had put down her empty wine-glass, and was resting her hands on the broad cushioned arms of her chair with, for a thin person, a sort of expanded content.

“You must pardon my tears,” she said, smiling; “it was the revulsion of feeling. My life was at a low ebb: if your sentence had been against me it would have been my end.”

“Your end?”

“Yes, the end of my life; I should have destroyed myself.”

“Then you would have been a weak as well as wicked woman,” I said in a tone of disgust. I do hate sensationalism.

“Oh no, you know nothing about it. I should have destroyed only this poor worn tenement of clay. But I can well understand how you would look upon it. Regarding the desirableness of life the prince and the beggar may have different opinions.–We will say no more of it, but talk of the drama instead.” As she spoke the word “drama” a triumphant brightness came into her eyes.

I took the manuscript from a drawer and sat down beside her. “I suppose you know that there are faults,” I said, expecting ready acquiescence.

“I was not aware that there were any,” was her gentle reply.

Here was a beginning! After all my interest in her–and, I may say under the circumstances, my kindness–she received me in this way! However, my belief in her genius was too sincere to be altered by her whimsies; so I persevered. “Let us go over it together,” I said. “Shall I read it to you, or will you read it to me?”

“I will not read it, but recite it.”

“That will never do; you will recite it so well that we shall see only the good points, and what we have to concern ourselves with now is the bad ones.”

“I will recite it,” she repeated.

“Now, Miss Crief,” I said bluntly, “for what purpose did you come to me? Certainly not merely to recite: I am no stage-manager. In plain English, was it not your idea that I might help you in obtaining a publisher?”