“Jasper, I love you. I _do_ love you. Did she pull your leg too? Both legs? She did! She did! Oh, there’s only one Madala!”
Mr. Flood’s vanity was in his cheeks while she rattled on.
“Darling Jasper, I thought better of you! Can’t you see the whole thing’s a skit? Giving the jampot public what they wanted! Why, it’s been out a year and they’re sucking the spoon still. It’s the resting-place! Ask the libraries! Oh, can’t you see?”
“If it is parody,” said Mr. Flood slowly, “then, I admit, it’s unique.”
“What else? You’ll not deny humour to her?”
“I do!” the blonde lady nodded her head. “Once a woman is in love she’s quite hopeless.”
“I don’t see how parody could be in question,” Anita broke in. “Anybody reading the book carefully must see that she’s in earnest. That’s the tragedy of it.”
“Not only literary. The psychological value is enormous. It’s not art, it’s record. It’s photography. That happened. That happened, tragically, to Madala. Oh, not the trimmings, of course, not the happy-ever-after. But to me it’s perfectly clear that that lapse into _Family Herald_ romance has had its equivalent in Madala’s own life. I’ve always felt a certain weakness in her character, you know—a certain sentimentalism.”
“In the author of _Eden Walls_?” said Miss Howe contemptuously.
“No, dear lady! But in the author of _The Resting-place_.” Mr. Flood had recovered himself.
“Skit, I tell you, skit!” she insisted. And they continued to bicker in undertones while Anita summed up the situation.
“No, my theory is this—Madala Grey met some man——”
“Carey?” asked Mr. Flood, dividing his allegiance.
“No, Carey comes later. There was—an episode——”
“Possibly. But an episode anyhow, that I place myself at the end of the _Ploughed Fields_ period. It may have been later, it may have been the following summer while she was working at _The Resting-place_. I’m open to conviction there. But an episode there must have been. In _The Resting-place_ she wrote it down as it ought to have happened.”
“Well, obviously it didn’t happen or she wouldn’t have become Mrs. Carey.”
“The gentleman loved and rode away, you mean?”
“Something of the sort. Something went wrong.”
“I see.” Miss Howe was interested. “It’s a theory, anyhow. And then in sheer savage irony at her own weakness——”