s happened to her father. And I must keep the interest of the
love-business light, without letting it become farcical. I must get
charm, all I can, into her character. You won't mind my getting the
charm all from you?"

"Oh, Brice, what sweet things you say to me! I wish everybody could know
how divine you are."

"The women would all be making love to me, and I should hate that. One
is quite enough."

"_Am_ I quite enough?" she entreated.

"You have been up to the present time."

"And do you think I shall always be?" She slid from her chair to her
knees on the floor beside him, where he sat at his desk, and put her
arms round him.

He did not seem to know it. "Look here, Louise, I have got to connect
this love-business with the main action of the play, somehow. It won't
do simply to have it an episode. How would it do to have Atland know all
the time that Haxard has killed Greenshaw, and be keeping it from
Salome, while she is betraying her love for him?"

"Wouldn't that be rather tawdry?" Louise let her arms slip down to her
side, and looked up at him, as she knelt.

"Yes, it would," he owned.

He looked very unhappy about it, and she rose to her feet, as if to give
it more serious attention. "Brice, I want your play to be thoroughly
honest and true from beginning to end, and not to have any sort of
catchpenny effectivism in it. You have planned it so nobly that I can't
bear to have you lower the standard the least bit; and I think the
honest and true way is to let the love-business be a pleasant fact in
the case, as it might very well be. Those things _do_ keep going on in
life alongside of the greatest misery, the greatest unhappiness."

"Well," said Maxwell, "I guess you are right about the love-business.
I'll treat it frankly for what it is, a fact in the case. That will be
the right way, and that will be the strong way. It will be like life. I
don't know that you are bound to relate things strictly to each other in
art, any more than they are related in life. There are all sorts of
incidents and interests playing round every great event that seem to
have no more relation to it than the rings of Saturn have to Saturn.
They form the atmosphere of it. If I can let Haxard's wretchedness be
seen at last through the atmosphere of his daughter's happiness!"

"Yes," she said, "that will be quite enough." She knew that they had
talked up to the moment when he could best begin to work, and now left
him to hims