"Madly. Specialists want it for honest data. The general reader has got an idea from the reviews that there's personal gossip in it, more or less racy. So it goes." "Well, let it go," said the old lady recklessly. "I shan't stop it." "No, but I can't help thinking Gilbert and Wall ought to be in the secret." "Do you imagine they'd stop printing?" "I don't imagine anything. I believe, to speak temperately, they'd drop dead. I only say it's a fearful and wonderful situation, and they ought to know it. You see, dear woman, you've not only played a joke on the public; you've played a joke on them." "Well, for goodness' sake, why not? What's a publisher, anyway? Has he got to be treated like a Hindu god? Billy Stark, I wish you'd stayed in London where you belong." Again Billy felt himself wheezing, and gave up to it as before. She watched him unwinkingly, and by and by she chuckled a little and then joined him, in an ecstasy. "Florrie," said he, "you're simply a glorious portent, and you've no more moral sense than the cat." "No, Billy, no!" She was answering in a happy acquiescence. "I never had any. I've always wanted some fun, and I want it to this day." Her old face changed surprisingly under a shade of gravity. "And see where it's led me." It was natural to conclude that her verdict embraced wider evidence than that of the erring book. Billy, quite serious in his turn, looked at her in candid invitation. She answered him earnestly and humbly: "Billy, I always took the wrong road. I took it in the beginning and I never got out of it." "There's a frightful number of wrong turnings," Billy offered, in rather inadequate sympathy, "and a great deficiency of guideposts." "You see, Billy, the first thing I did was to give up Charlie Grant and marry Mark Fulton. I was only a country girl. Charlie was a country boy. I thought Mark must be a remarkable person because he was a professor in Cambridge. I thought Charlie was going to be a poor little country doctor, because he was studying medicine with another country doctor, and he couldn't go to college to save his skin. There were eight children, you know, younger than he. He had to work on the farm. Well, Billy, I made a mistake." Stark marveled at the crude simplicity of all this. He forgot, for the moment, that she was an old woman, and that for a long time she had been conning over the past like a secret record, full of blemishes, perhaps, but not now to be remedied. "You did like Charlie," he ventured. "I knew that." "I liked him very much. And I've never quite escaped from his line of life, if that's what they call it. Since Electra was alone and I came here to stay with her, I've been thrown with his widow. Bessie's an old woman, too, you know, like me. But she's a different kind." "She was a pretty girl. Rather sedate, I remember, for a girl."