Part 67

"Are they so difficult?"

"The ones I want are. I don't want any but the best."

She smiled.

"It's all very well to smile; but this kind of magazine hasn't really been tried before. There's room for it."

"Oh, oceans of room."

"And it will have all the room there is. Now's its moment. All the good old magazines are dead."

"And gone to heaven because they were so good."

"Because they were old. My magazine will be young."

"There has been frightful mortality among the young."

"I know the things you mean. They were decadent, neurotic, morbid, worse than old. My magazine will be really young. It's the young writers that I want. And there isn't one of them I want as much as you."

She seemed to have hardly heard him.

"Have you asked Mr. Tanqueray?"

"Not yet. You're the first I've asked. The very first."

"You should have asked him first."

"I didn't want him first."

"You should have wanted him. Why" (she persisted), "did you come to me before him?"

"Because you're so much more valuable to me."

"In what way?"

"Your name is better known."

"It oughtn't to be. If it's names you want----" She gave him a string of them.

"Your name stands for more."

"And Mr. Tanqueray's? Does it not stand?"

He hesitated.

She insisted. "If mine does."

"I am corrupt," said Brodrick, "and mercenary and brutal."

"I wish you weren't," said she, so earnestly that he laughed.

"My dear Miss Holland, we cannot blink the fact that you have a name and he hasn't."

"Or that my name sells and his doesn't. Is that it?"