she sat at her typewriter the next day, she would recall one of his
quaint remarks that suddenly threw a bright light on some matter
hitherto obscure.... Occasionally a novel or a play was the subject
of their talk, and then they took a delight in drawing her out,
in appealing to a spontaneous judgment unhampered by pedagogically
implanted preconceptions. Janet would grow hot from shyness.

"Say what you think, my dear," Mrs. Maturin would urge her. "And
remember that your own opinion is worth more than Shakespeare's or
Napoleon's!"

Insall would escort her home to Mrs. Case's boarding house....

One afternoon early in June Janet sat in her little room working at her
letters when Brooks Insall came in. "I don't mean to intrude in business
hours, but I wanted to ask if you would do a little copying for me,"
he said, and he laid on her desk a parcel bound with characteristic
neatness.

"Something you've written?" she exclaimed, blushing with pleasure and
surprise. He was actually confiding to her one of his manuscripts!

"Well--yes," he replied comically, eyeing her.

"I'll be very careful with it. I'll do it right away."

"There's no particular hurry," he assured her. "The editor's waited six
months for it--another month or so won't matter."

"Another month or so!" she ejaculated,--but he was gone. Of course
she couldn't have expected him to remain and talk about it; but this
unexpected exhibition of shyness concerning his work--so admired by the
world's choicer spirits--thrilled yet amused her, and made her glow with
a new understanding. With eager fingers she undid the string and sat
staring at the regular script without taking in, at first, the meaning
of a single sentence. It was a comparatively short sketch entitled "The
Exile," in which shining, winged truths and elusive beauties flitted
continually against a dark-background of Puritan oppression; the story
of one Basil Grelott, a dreamer of Milton's day, Oxford nurtured, who,
casting off the shackles of dogma and man-made decrees, sailed with
his books to the New England wilderness across the sea. There he lived,
among the savages, in peace and freedom until the arrival of Winthrop
and his devotees, to encounter persecution from those who themselves
had fled from it. The Lord's Brethren, he averred, were worse than the
Lord's Bishops--Blackstone's phrase. Janet, of course, had never heard
of Blackstone, some of whose experiences Insall had evidently used