She had never before met a literary man;
had no idea how the trick was done; and she asked many of those
ingenuous questions which seldom really displease the average gentleman
of this type. When not expatiating upon the heroine whom the exigencies
of "serial rights" demanded in his books, Charles Langholm, the talker
and the man, was an unmuzzled misogynist. But nobody would have
suspected it from his answers to Rachel's questions, or from any portion
of their animated conversation. Certainly the aquiline lady whom
Langholm had taken in, and to whom he was only attentive by remorseful
fits and penitential starts, had not that satisfaction; for her
right-hand neighbor did not speak to her at all. There was thus one
close and critical follower of a conversation which without warning took
the one dramatic turn for which Rachel was forever on her guard; only
this once, in an hour of unexpected entertainment, was she not.
"How do I get my plots?" said Langholm. "Sometimes out of my head, as
they say in the nursery; occasionally from real life; more often a blend
of the two combined. You don't often get a present from the newspaper
that you can lift into a magazine more or less as it stands.
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