"You mean," she said at last, "the things he says about himself?"
"Precisely. The things he says about himself. I doubt if he really
intended them all for publication."
"It's not the things he says about himself so much," she said. "We
could leave some of them out. It's what Grevill might have said
about him."
That was awful; but it helped me; it showed me where to plant the
blow that would do for her, poor lamb.
"My dear child," I said (I was very gentle, now that I had come to
it, to my butcher's work), "that's what I want you to realize.
He'll--he'll say what he can, of course; but he can't say very
much. There--there isn't really very much to say."
She took it in silence. She was too much hurt, I thought, to see. I
softened it and at the same time made it luminous.
"I mean," I said, "for Grevill to say."
She saw.
"You mean," she said simply, "he isn't great enough?"