before with this confidence of the sincere admirer and
the comrade. That, yes, through his sudden sharpening chill, was
what first became distinct for him; she was mentioning somehow her
explanation and her conditions--her motive, in fine, disconcerting,
deplorable, dreadful, in respect to the experience, otherwise so
boundless, that he had taken her as having opened to him; and she
was doing it, above all, with the clearest coolness of her general
privilege. What in particular she was talking about he as yet, still
holding his breath, wondered; it was something she wanted him to do for
her--which was exactly what he had hoped, but something of what trivial
and, heaven forgive them both, of what dismal order? Most of all,
meanwhile, he felt the dire penetration of two or three of the words
she had used; so that after a painful minute the quaver with which he
repeated them resembled his-drawing, slowly, carefully, timidly, some
barbed dart out of his flesh.

"A 'literary friend'?" he echoed as he turned his face more to her; so
that, as they sat, the whites of her eyes, near to his own, gleamed in
the dusk like some silver setting of deep sapphires.

It made her smile--which in their relation now was like the breaking
of a cool air-wave over the conscious sore flush that maintained itself
through his general chill. "Ah, of course you don't allow that I
_am_ literary--and of course if you're awfully cruel and critical and
incorruptible you won't let it say for me what I so want it should!"

"Where are we, where, in the name of all that's damnably, of all that's
grotesquely delusive, are we?" he said, without a sign, to himself;
which was the form of his really being quite at sea as to what she was
talking about. That uncertainty indeed he could but frankly betray by
taking her up, as he cast about him, on the particular ambiguity that
his voice perhaps already showed him to find most irritating. "Let it
show? 'It,' dear Princess----?"

"Why, my dear man, let your Preface show, the lovely, friendly,
irresistible log-rolling Preface that I've been asking you if you
wouldn't be an angel and write for me."

He took it in with a deep long gulp--he had never, it seemed to him,
had to swallow anything so bitter. "You've been asking me if I wouldn't
write you a Preface?"

"To 'The Velvet Glove'--after I've sent it to you and you've judged
if you really can. Of course I don't want you to perjure yourself;
but"--and she fair