ndly eyes behind the glasses.

When she entered the study, she found Trevor himself, as she had
expected, waiting for her in slippers and worn velvet jacket, pipe in
hand, and silk skullcap awry upon the silver-white hair. He extended an
inky hand, and still holding it and talking, led her to an easy-chair
near the hearth.

Even through the perturbation of her mind Rosella could not but
wonder--for the hundredth time--at the apparent discrepancy between the
great novelist and the nature of his books. These latter were, each and
all of them, wonders of artistic composition, compared with the hordes
of latter-day pictures. They were the aristocrats of their kind, full of
reserved force, unimpeachable in dignity, stately even, at times
veritably austere.

And Trevor himself was a short, rotund man, rubicund as to face,
bourgeois as to clothes and surroundings (the bisque statuette of a
fisher-boy obtruded the vulgarity of its gilding and tinting from the
mantelpiece), jovial in manner, indulging even in slang. One might
easily have set him down as a retired groceryman--wholesale perhaps, but
none the less a groceryman. Yet touch him upon the subject of his
profession, and the bonhomie lapsed away from him at once. Then he
became serious. Literature was not a thing to be trifled with.

Thus it was tonight. For five minutes Trevor filled the room with the
roaring of his own laughter and the echoes of his own vociferous voice.
He was telling a story--a funny story, about what Rosella, with her
thoughts on "Patroclus," could not for the life of her have said, and
she must needs listen in patience and with perfunctory merriment while
the narrative was conducted to its close with all the accompaniment of
stamped feet and slapped knees.

"'Why, becoth, mithtah,' said that nigger. 'Dat dawg ain' good fo'
nothin' ailse; so I jes rickon he 'th boun' to be a coon dawg;'" and the
author of "Snow in April" pounded the arm of his chair and roared till
the gas-fixtures vibrated.

Then at last, taking advantage of a lull in the talk, Rosella, unable
to contain her patience longer, found breath to remark:

"And 'Patroclus'--my--my little book?"

"Ah--hum, yes. 'Patroclus,' your story. I've read it."

At once another man was before her, or rather the writer--the
novelist--_in_ the man. Something of the dignity of his literary style
immediately seemed to invest him with a new character. He fell quiet,
grave, not a little abstracte