I write in English--which I love, I assure you, as much as you can
yourself do, and which gives one (doesn't it? for who should know if
not you?) the biggest of publics. I 'just love'--don't they say?--your
American millions; and all the more that they really _take_ me for Amy
Evans, as I've just wanted to be taken, to be loved too for myself,
don't you know?--that they haven't seemed to try at all to 'go behind'
(don't you say?) my poor dear little _nom de guerre_. But it's the new
one, my last, 'The Velvet Glove,' that I should like you to judge me
by--if such a _corvee_ isn't too horrible for you to think of; though
I admit it's a move straight in the romantic direction--since after
all (for I might as well make a clean breast of it) it's dear old
discredited romance that I'm most in sympathy with. I'll send you 'The
Velvet Glove' to-morrow, if you _can_ find half an hour for it; and
then--and _then_--!" She paused as for the positive bright glory of her
meaning.

It could only be so extraordinary, her meaning, whatever it was,
that the need in him that would--whatever it was again!--meet it most
absolutely formed the syllables on his lips as: "Will you be very,
_very_ kind to me?"

"Ah 'kind,' dear Mr. Berridge? 'Kind,'" she splendidly laughed, "is
nothing to what--!" But she pulled herself up again an instant. "Well,
to what I want to be! Just _see_," she said, "how I want to be!" It
was exactly, he felt, what he couldn't _but_ see--in spite of books and
publics and pen-names, in spite of the really "decadent" perversity,
recalling that of the most irresponsibly insolent of the old Romans
and Byzantines, that could lead a creature so formed for living and
breathing her Romance, and so committed, up to the eyes, to the constant
fact of her personal immersion in it and genius for it, the dreadful
amateurish dance of ungrammatically scribbling it, with editions and
advertisements and reviews and royalties and every other futile item:
since what was more of the deep essence of throbbing intercourse itself
than this very act of her having broken away from people, in the other
room, to whom he was as nought, of her having, with her _cranerie_ of
audacity and indifference, just turned her back on them all as soon as
she had begun to miss him? What was more of it than her having forbidden
them, by a sufficient curt ring of her own supremely silver tone, to
attempt to check or criticise her freedom, than her having looked