gitation.

So, instead of insisting on her failure, he tried to diminish her
disturbing sense of it; and when she inquired if she had done her work
very badly, he smiled and said, No, she had done it much too well.

"Too well?" She flushed as she echoed him.

"Yes. You've corrected all Mr. Tanqueray's punctuation and nearly all
his grammar."

"But it's all wrong. Look there--and there."

"How do you know it's all wrong?"

"But--it's so simple. There are rules."

"Yes. But Mr. Tanqueray's a great author, and great authors are born to
break half the rules there are. What you and I have got to know is when
they _may_ break them, and when they mayn't."

A liquid film swam over Gertrude's eyes, deepening their shallows. It
was the first signal of distress.

"It's all right," he said. "I wanted you to do it. I wanted to see what
you could do." He considered her quietly. "It struck me you might
perhaps prefer it to your other duties."

"What made you think that?"

"I didn't think. I only wondered. Well----"

The next half-hour was occupied with the morning's correspondence, till
Brodrick announced that they had no time for more.

"It's only just past four," she said.

"I know; but----Is there anything for tea?" He spoke vaguely like a man
in a dream.

"What an opinion you have of my housekeeping," she said.

"Your housekeeping, Miss Collett, is perfection."

She flushed with pleasure, so that he kept it up.

"Everything," he said, "runs on greased wheels. I don't know how you do
it."

"Oh, it's easy enough to do."

"And it doesn't matter if a lady comes to tea?"

He took up a pencil and began to sharpen it.

"Is there," said Miss Collett, "a lady coming to tea?"

"Yes. And we'll have it in the garden. Tea, I mean."

"And who," said she, "is the lady?"

"Miss Jane Holland." Brodrick did not look up. He was absorbed in his
pencil.

"Another author?"

"Another author," said Brodrick to his pencil.

She smiled. The editor's attitude to authors was one of prolonged
amusement. Prodigious people, authors, in Brodrick's opinion. More than
once, by way of relieving his somewhat perfunctory communion with Miss
Collett, he had discussed the eccentricity, the vanity, the
inexhaustible absurdity of authors. So that it was permissible for her
to smile.

"You are not," he said, "expecting either of my sisters?"

He said it in his most casual, most uninterested voice. And yet she
detected an undertone