George Jasper
found Elfrida's manuscript in a neat, thick, oblong paper
parcel, waiting for him on his dressing-table. He felt
himself particularly wide awake, and he had a consciousness
that the evening had made a very small inroad upon his
capacity for saying clever things. So he went over "An
Adventure in Stage-Land" at once, and in writing his
opinion of it to Mr. Pitt, which he did with some
elaboration, a couple of hours later, he had all the
relief of a revenge upon a well-meaning hostess, without
the reproach of having done her the slightest harm. It
is probable that if Mr. Jasper had known that the opinion
of the firm's "reader" was to find its way to the author,
he would have expressed himself in terms of more guarded
commonplace, for we cannot believe that he still cherished
a sufficiently lively resentment at having his hand
publicly kissed by a pretty girl to do otherwise; but
Mr. Pitt had not thought it necessary to tell him of this
condition, which Rattray, at Elfrida's express desire,
had exacted. As it happened, nobody can ever know precisely
what he wrote, except Mr. Pitt, who has forgotten, and
Mr. Arthur Rattray, who tries to forget; for the letter,
the morning after it had been received, which was the
morning after the portrait met its fate, lay in a little
charred heap in the fireplace of Elfrida's room, when
Janet Cardiff pushed the screen aside at last and went in.
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