“‘By Heaven, I will promise any thing!’” Kendal quoted, laughing, from a poet much in vogue.

“Only this—­I hope I am not selfish—­” she hesitated; “but I think—­yes, I think I must be selfish here.  It is that you will never read the Age.”

“I never do,” leapt to his lips, but he stopped it in time.  “And why!” he asked instead.

“Ah, you know why!  It is because you might recognize my work in it—­by accident you might—­and that would be so painful to me.  It is not my best—­please believe it is not my best!”

“On one condition I promise,” he said:  “that when you do your best you will tell me where to find it”

She looked at him gravely and considered.  As she did so it seemed to Kendal that she was regarding his whole moral, mental, and material nature.  He could almost see it reflected in the glass of her great dark eyes.  “Certainly, yes.  That is fair—­if you really and truly care to see it.  And I don’t know,” she added, looking up at him from her soup, “that it matters whether you do or not, so long as you carefully and accurately pretend that you do.  When my best, my real best, sees the light of common—­”

“Type,” he suggested.

“Type,” she repeated unsmilingly, “I shall be so insatiate for criticism—­I ought to say praise—­that I shall even go so far as to send you a marked copy, very plainly marked, with blue pencil.  Already,” she smiled with a charming effect of assertiveness, “I have bought the blue pencil.”

“Will it come soon?” Kendal asked seriously.

“Cher ami,” Elfrida said, drawing her handsome brows together a little, “it will come sooner than you expect That is what I want,” she went on deliberately, “more than anything else in the whole world, to do things —­good things, you understand—­and to have them appreciated and paid for in the admiration of people who feel and see and know.  For me life has nothing else, except the things that other people do, better and worse than mine.”

“Better and worse than yours,” Kendal repeated.  “Can’t you think of them apart?”

“No, I can’t,” Elfrida interrupted; “I’ve tried, and I can not.  I know it’s a weakness—­at least I’m half persuaded that it is—­but I must have the personal standard in everything.”

“But you are a hero-worshipper; often I have seen you at it.”

“Yes,” she said cynically, while the white-capped maid who handed Kendal asparagus stared at her with a curiosity few of the Hyacinth’s lady diners inspired, “and when I look into that I find it is because of a secret consciousness that tells me that I, in the hero’s place, should have done just the same thing.  Or else it is because of the gratification my vanity finds in my sympathy with his work, whatever it is.  Oh, it is no special virtue, my kind of hero-worship.”  The girl looked across at Kendal and laughed a bright, frank laugh, in which was no discontent with what she had been telling him.