“Well, well!” said he, smiling and blinking.  “Come in, Susanna!”

“Mrs. Saunders wanted me to ask you—–­”

“But come in!  I’ve reached a tight corner; couldn’t get any further anyway!” He pushed away his papers.  “There are days, you know, when you’re not even on bowing acquaintance with your characters.”

He looked so genial, so almost fatherly, so contentedly lazy, leaning back in his big chair, the winter sunshine streaming in the window behind him, and a dozen jars of fragrant winter flowers making the whole room sweet, that Susan came in, unhesitatingly.  It was the mood of all his moods that she liked best; interested, interesting, impersonal.

“But I oughtn’t—­you’re writing,” said Susan, taking a chair across the table from him, and laying bold hands on his manuscript, nevertheless.  “What a darling hand you write!” she observed, “and what enormous margins.  Oh, I see, you write notes in the margins—­ corrections?”

“Exactly!” He was watching her between half-closed lids, with lazy pleasure.

“‘The only,’ in a loop,” said Susan, “that’s not much of a note!  I could have written that myself,” she added, eying him sideways through a film of drifting hair.

“Very well, write anything you like!” he offered amusedly.

“Oh, honestly?” asked Susan with dancing eyes.  And, at his nod, she dipped a pen in the ink, and began to read the story with a serious scowl.

“Here!” she said suddenly, “this isn’t at all sensible!” And she read aloud: 

    “So crystal clear was the gaze with which he met her own,
     that she was aware of an immediate sense, a vaguely alarming
     sense, that her confidence must be made with concessions not
     only to what he had told her—­and told her so exquisitely as to
     indicate his knowledge of other facts from which those he
     chose to reveal were deliberately selected—­but also to what he
     had not—­surely the most significant detail of the whole
significant
     episode—­so chosen to reveal!”

“Oh, I see what it means, when I read it aloud,” said Susan, cheerfully honest.  “But at first it didn’t seem to make sense!”

“Go ahead.  Fix it anyway you like.”

“Well—–­” Susan dimpled.  “Then I’ll—­let’s see—­I’ll put ‘surely’ after ‘also,’” she announced, “and end it up, ’to what he had not so chosen to reveal!’ Don’t you think that’s better?”

“Clearer, certainly.—­On that margin, Baby.”

“And will you really let it stay that way?” asked the baby, eying the altered page with great satisfaction.

“Oh, really.  You will see it so in the book.”

His quiet certainty that these scattered pages would surely be a book some day thrilled Susan, as power always thrilled her.  Just as she had admired Thorny’s old scribbled prices, years before, so she admired this quiet mastery now.  She asked Stephen Bocqueraz questions, and he told her of his boyhood dreams, of the early struggles in the big city, of the first success.