"There are many things beyond you yet, dear boy; many, many things," was her laughing rejoinder; from which it will be inferred that the episode in the Farmers' and Merchants' burglar-proof had become an episode forgotten--or at least forgiven. "You know men--a little; but when it comes to the women ... well, if I didn't keep continually nagging at you, your two heroines--with neither of whom you are really in love--would degenerate into rag dolls. They would, actually."
"That's true; I can see it clearly enough when you point it out," he admitted, putting his craftsman pride underfoot, as he was always obliged to do in these talks with her. "I should be discouraged if you didn't keep on telling me that the story, as a story, is good."
"It _is_ good; it is a big story," she asserted, with kindling enthusiasm. "The plot, so far as you have gone with it, is fine; and that is where you leave me away behind. I don't see how you could ever think it out. And the character-drawing is fine, too, some of it. Your _Fleming_ is as far beyond me as your _Fidelia_ seems to be beyond you."
"_Fleming_ is human in every drop of his blood," he boasted.
"I don't doubt it for a moment; all the little ear-marks of humanity are there, and I know in reason that he must be a type. But I have never met the man himself; and I am sure I shall be scared silly if I ever do meet him. Think of being shut up in any little corner of the world with a man who has convinced himself that he can commit any crime in the calendar so long as he believes the particular one he chooses isn't a crime!"
"Crime, so-called, is like everything else in this world; a thing to be defined strictly by the motive and the point of view," said Griswold, mounting his hobby with joyous alacrity.
"I know; that is what you say"--this with an adorable uptilt of the pretty chin and a flash of the dark eyes which an instant before had been slumbrous wells of studious abstraction. "But your _Fleming_ is going to prove the contrary; it may not be what you want him to do, but it will be what he will insist upon doing before you get through with him. You have already indicated it in the story, unconsciously, perhaps. When _Fidelia_ surprises him, _Fleming_ is almost ready to kill her; not in defense of the principle he has set up, but to save his own miserable life."