She looked scared for a moment. Then she rallied.

"But it's the whole thing we want. He wanted it. I know he did. He
wanted to be represented completely or not at all. As he stood. As
he stood," she reiterated.

She had given me the word I wanted. I could do it gently now.

"That's it," I said. "These 'Memoirs' won't represent him."

Subtlety, diabolic or divine, was given me. I went at it like a man
inspired.

"They won't do him justice. They'll do him harm."

"Harm?" She breathed it with an audible fright.

"Very great harm. They give a wrong impression, an impression
of--of----"

I left it to her. It sank in. She pondered it.

"You mean," she said at last, "the things he says about himself?"

"Precisely. The things he says about himself. I doubt if he really
intended them all for publication."

"It's not the things he says about himself so much," she said. "We
could leave some of them out. It's what Grevill might have said
about him."

That was awful; but it helped me; it showed me where to plant the
blow that would do for her, poor lamb.

"My dear child," I said (I was very gentle, now that I had come to
it, to my butcher's work), "that's what I want you to realize.
He'll--he'll say what he can, of course; but he can't say very
much. There--there isn't really very much to say."

She took it in silence. She was too much hurt, I thought, to see. I
softened it and at the same time made it luminous.

"I mean," I said, "for Grevill to say."

She saw.

"You mean," she said simply, "he isn't great enough?"

I amended it. "For Grevill."

"Grevill," she repeated. I shall never forget how she said it. It
was as if her voice reached out and touched him tenderly.

"Lankester is more in his line," I said. "It's a question of
temperament, of fitness."

She said she knew that.

"And," I said, "of proportion. If he says what you want him to say
about your father, what can he say about Lankester?"

"But if he does Lankester first?"

"Then--if he says what you want him to say--he undoes everything he
has done for Lankester. And," I added, "_he's_ done for."

She hadn't seen that aspect of it, for she said: "Grevill is?"

I said he was, of course. I said we all felt that strongly; Grevill
felt it himself. It would finish him.

Dear Antigone, I saw her take it. She pressed the sword into her
heart. "If--if he did Papa? Is it--is it as bad as all that?"

I said we were afraid it was--for Grevill