Marion, on his side, gave a feeble stir to the mass of paper, and said, rather sadly: "Are you sure you left them on this table?" He felt that something was going wrong. Lady Tal had been unusually restive about the alterations he wanted her to make. "You are slanging those poor scissors because you are out of patience with things in general, Lady Tal." She raised her head, and leaning both her long, well-shaped hands on the table, looked full at Marion: "Not with things in general, but with things in particular. With _Christina_, in the first place; and then with myself; and then with you, Mr. Marion." "With me?" answered Marion, forcing out a smile of pseudo-surprise. He had felt all along that she was irritated with him this morning. "With you"--went on the lady, continuing to rummage for the scissors--"with you, because I don't think you've been quite fair. It isn't fair to put it into an unfortunate creature's head that she is an incipient George Eliot, when you know that if she were to slave till doomsday, she couldn't produce a novel fit for the _Family Herald_. It's very ungrateful of me to complain, but you see it is rather hard lines upon me. You can do all this sort of thing as easy as winking, and you imagine that everyone else must. You put all your own ideas into poor _Christina_, and you just expect me to be able to carry them out, and when I make a hideous hash, you're not satisfied. You think of that novel just as if it were you writing it--you know you do. Well, then, when a woman discovers at last that she can't make the beastly thing any better; that she's been made to hope too much, and that too much is asked of her, you understand it's rather irritating. I am sick of re-writing that thing, sick of every creature in it." And Lady Tal gave an angry toss to the sheets of manuscript with the long pair of dressmaker's scissors, which she had finally unburied. Marion felt a little pang. The pang of a clever man who discovers himself to be perpetrating a stupidity. He frowned that little frown of the tight boots. Quite true. He saw, all of a sudden, that he really had been over-estimating Lady Tal's literary powers. It appeared to him monstrous. The thought made him redden. To what unjustifiable lengths had his interest in the novel--the novel in the abstract, anybody's novel; and (he confessed to himself) the interest in one novel in particular, his own, the one in which Lady Tal should figure--led him away! Perceiving himself violently to be in the wrong, he proceeded to assume the manner, as is the case with most of us under similar circumstances (perhaps from a natural instinct of balancing matters) of a person conscious of being in the right. "I think," he said, dryly, "that you have rather overdone this novel, Lady Tal--worked at it too much, talked of it too much too, sickened yourself with it." "--And sickened others," put in Lady Atalanta gloomily.