doesn't
it? I know how you feel. They had an author man at a place we were
staying at the other day--Maurice Ash--and he told me that although he
says it doesn't matter, and knows it doesn't matter, when an absolutely
trivial person says something riling about any of his stuff, still it
does matter. He said a thing you've produced out of yourself you can't
bear to have slighted--not by the butcher. Gladys Occleve made us laugh.
Maurice Ash said to her, 'It's like a mother's child. Look here, you're
a countess,' he said to her. 'You oughtn't to mind what a butcher thinks
of your children; but supposing the butcher said your infant Henry was a
stupid little brat; what would you do?' Gladys said she'd dash a best
end of the neck straight into his face."

Sabre laughed. "Yes, that's the feeling. But of course, all these
books"--he indicated the shelves--"aren't mine, not my children, more
like my adopted children."

She declared it was the same thing. "More so, in a way. You've invented
them, haven't you, called them out of the vasty deep sort of thing and
brought them up in the way they should go. I do think it's rather fine,
Marko."

She was at the shelves, scanning the books. Her fond, her almost tender
sympathy made him, too, feel that it was rather fine. Her light words
in her high, clear tone voiced exactly his feelings towards the books.
Talking with her was, in the reception and return of his thoughts,
nearer to reading a book that delighted him than to anything else with
which he could compare it. There was the same interchange of ideas, not
necessarily expressed; the same creation and play of fancy, imagined,
not stated.

Her hands were moving about the volumes, pulling out a book here and
there; she mused the titles. "'Greek Unseens--Prose'; 'Greek
Unseens--Verse'; 'Latin Unseens--Verse.' Marvellous person, Marko! 'The
Shell Algebra'; 'The Shell Latin Grammar'; 'The Shell English
Literature': 'The Shell Modern Geography.' That's a series 'The Shell,'
eh? I _do_ call that a good idea. 'The Six Terms Chemistry'; 'The Six
Terms Geology.'"

"Yes, that's another series," he said. He was standing beside her.
Delightful this! His pride in his work thrilled anew. "You see the idea
of the thing. Gives the boy the feeling of something definite to get
through in a definite time."

She was reading one of the prefaces, signed with his initials. "Yes,
that's ever so good. I see what you've written here, '...avoiding t