“But,” he said, “it is very like others of my series. I made sure it would be popular.”
“I’m not a judge of that. It’s possible enough. And now”--she smiled a little wryly--“I’m afraid you know my opinion of the series. I warned you,” she added hastily, “that my opinions were intolerant. I imagine you will not ask for them again.” She turned resolutely to the typewriter and took its cover off. She thought she had closed the discussion, and was suiting action to her word, and sitting at her desk when he motioned her back to the chair opposite his. It was not the sort of motion one ignored.
“I may ask for them again or I may not,” he said; “but in the meantime I have certainly not given you anything to do at that machine, and we were trying to forget that you are my typist.”
“I thought after what I’ve said that it might be time to remember it,” she suggested.
“Not at all,” he assured her. “I get to the bottom of things, and, if you please, we’ll have this out.”
“Of course, if this is part of your secretary’s work----” she began.
He cut her short. “It is. Now, you find my novel series appalling?”
Effie was growing angry. _In vino veritas_--and in anger. “I could go even further,” she said. “I find it degrading.”
He thumped the desk. “But it sells, Miss Mannering, it sells. Did you know that?” He leant back in his chair in one of the attitudes he took when he was scoring heavily, thumbs in his waistcoat arm-holes.
“It’s the most popular series of cheap novels on the market. See any bookstall, if you doubt me.” He paused for her apology.
Effle did not apologize. “That does not alter my opinion of it,” she said coolly. “A public danger isn’t less dangerous because it’s large. I’m afraid I can believe that there are no depths to which it is impossible to degrade the public taste, but that does not make me like any the better a series which degrades it.”
Now a child is a child. It may be deformed, and its begetter may in clairvoyant moments have acknowledged the deformity to himself, but he resents its being pointed out to him. Sam was the father of his series.
“It’s a nasty series,” she said hardily. “You are proud of it because it sells when you ought to be ashamed of it because it’s bad.” Somehow she had to say it. She couldn’t hedge from what she saw as truth, even though she expected truth to hurt him and to be hurt in return. But Sam wonderfully controlled himself. Emphatically, he was forgetting that she was a typist. He remembered that she was Effie.