I relinquished the point.  “Who’s Schofield?” I asked instead.

“He was a very good friend of Michael’s—­of both of us.  You can talk quite freely to him.  I want to say at the beginning that I should like him to be associated with you in this.”

I don’t know how I divined on the spot her relation to Schofield, whoever he was.  She told me that he too was a painter.

“Michael thought very highly of his things,” she said.

“I don’t know them,” I replied.

“You probably wouldn’t,” she returned....

But I caught the quick drop of her eyes from their brief excursion round my library, and I felt something within me stiffen a little.  It did not need Maschka Andriaovsky to remind me that I had not attained my position without—­let us say—­splitting certain differences; the looseness of the expression can be corrected hereafter.  Life consists very largely of compromises.  You doubtless know my name, whichever country or hemisphere you happen to live in, as that of the creator of Martin Renard, the famous and popular detective; and I was not at that moment disposed to apologise, either to Maschka or Schofield or anybody else, for having written the stories at the bidding of a gaping public.  The moment the public showed that it wanted something better I was prepared to give it.  In the meantime, I sat in my very comfortable library, securely shielded from distress by my balance at my banker’s.

“Well,” I said after a moment, “let’s see how we stand.  And first as to what you’re likely to get out of this.  It goes without saying, of course, that by writing the ‘Life’ I can get you any amount of ’fame’—­advertisement, newspaper talk, and all the things that, it struck me, Michael always treated with especial scorn.  My name alone, I say, will do that.  But for anything else I’m by no means so sure.  You see,” I explained, “it doesn’t follow that because I can sell hundreds of thousands of... you know what... that I can sell anything I’ve a mind to sign.”  I said it, confident that she had not lived all those years with her brother without having learned the axiomatic nature of it.  To my discomfiture, she began to talk like a callow student.

“I should have thought that it followed that if you could sell something—­” she hesitated only for a moment, then courageously gave the other stuff its proper adjective, “—­something rotten, you could have sold something good when you had the chance.”

“Then if you thought that you were wrong,” I replied briefly and concisely.

“Michael couldn’t, of course,” she said, putting Michael out of the question with a little wave of her hand, “because Michael was—­I mean, Michael wasn’t a business man.  You are.”

“I’m speaking as one,” I replied.  “I don’t waste time in giving people what they don’t want.  That is business.  I don’t undertake your brother’s ‘Life’ as a matter of business, but as an inestimable privilege.  I repeat, it doesn’t follow that the public will buy it.”