BOOK III. THE VICTIM HESITATESThey hadopened a wooden box which lay beside them.
“Ten years!” she said. “How they have faded!”
“And the creases are tight,” said he; “they will be hard to read.”
“Letters! letters!” she exclaimed—“some of them sixty pages long! How much would they make?”
“Perhaps a quarter of a million words,” he said.
“What is to be done about it?”
“They must be selected, and then cut, and then trimmed and pruned.”
“And will that leave any idea of it?”
He answered with a simile. “You wish to convey to a man how it feels to poundstone for twelve hours in the sun. The only way you could really do it would be to take him and let him pound for twelve hours. But he wouldn’t stand for that.”
“So you let him pound for one hour,” said she, with a smile.
“I will put up a s
