“Week-end after week-end Gabriel Stanton came down, and all the hours of the day they passed together. Four months of the waiting time had gone by and her freedom was in sight. Her nerves were taut and fretted. She often had fainting attacks. He never questioned me about her but once. I told him the truth, that she had suffered, was suffering more than any woman can endure, any young and delicate woman. And her love for him grew....” I did not want to stop the show, the moving figures and changing slides, yet I called out from my swaying bed: “No, no, she never loved him.” And Peter Kennedy turned his eyes upon me, his surprised and questioning eyes. “Why do you say that? Do you know a better way of loving?” “Yes, many better ways.” “You have loved, then?” “Read my books.” “The love-making in your novels? Is that all you know?” A coal fell from the fire; I frowned and said something sharply. He did not go on, and I may have slept a little. When I looked up again there was no more sheet nor Peter. Instead Margaret herself sat in the easy-chair and asked me how I was getting on with her story. “Not very well. I don’t understand why you took pleasure in making Gabriel miserable by your scenes and vapours. That first day now. What did you mean by telling him of your reaction on seeing him, that it might have been because he had cut himself shaving, or because of the shape of his hat; the hang of his coat disappointed you. Either you loved the man or you did not. Why hurt his feelings, deliberately, unnecessarily? Why did you tell him not to come and then telegraph him? Why should I write your story? I don’t know the end of it, but already I am out of sympathy with you.” “You were that from the first,” she answered unhappily. “Don’t think I am ignorant of that. In a way, I suppose you are still jealous of me.” “I! jealous! And of you?” “Why did you pretend you did not know my books, and send for them to the London Library? You knew them well enough and resented my reputation. The _Spectator_, the _Saturday Review_, the _Quarterly_; you were dismissed in a paragraph where I had a column and a turn.” “At least you never sold as well as I did.” “That is where the trouble comes in, as you would say—although you are a little better in that way than you used to be. You wanted to ‘serve God and Mammon,’ to be applauded in the literary reviews whilst working up sentimental situations with which to draw tears from shopgirls....” “I am conscious of being unfairly treated by the so-called literary papers,” I argued. “I write of human beings, men and women; loving, suffering, living. You wrote of abstractions, making phrases. The sentences of one of your characters could have been put in the mouths of any of the others. Life, it was of life I wrote. Now that I am dying....”