 CHAPTER 1 The morning was as dark and cold as city snow could make it, a dingy world at the window, a smoky gust through the fireplace, a shadow black as a bear's cave under the table. Nothing in all the cavernous room loomed really warm or familiar, except a glass of stale water and a vapid half-eaten grapefruit. Packed into his pudgy pillows like a fragile piece of china, instead of a human being, Carl Stenton lay on cursed the brutal northern winter. Between his sturdy restive shoulders, the rheumatism snarled and clawed like some utterly frenzied animal trying to gnaw, gnaw, gnaw its way out. Along the tortured hollow of his back, a red-hot plaster fumed and mulled, and sucked at the pain like a hideously poisoned fang, trying to gnaw, gnaw, gnaw its way in. Worse than this, every four or five minutes an agony as miserably comic as a crashing blow on one's crazy bone went jarring and shuddering through his whole abnormally vibrant system. In Stenton's swollen fingers Cornelia's large crisp letter rustled not softly like a lady's skirts, but bleakly as an ice storm in December woods. Cornelia's whole angular handwriting, in fact, was not at all unlike a thicket of twigs stripped from root to branch of every possible softening leaf. Dear Carl, crackled the letter, in spite of your unpleasant tantrum yesterday, because I would not kiss you good-bye in the presence of my mother, I am good-natured enough, you see, to write you a good-bye letter after all. But I certainly will not promise to write you daily, so kindly do not tease me any more about it. In the first place you understand that I greatly dislike letter writing. In the second place you know Jacksonville quite as well as I do, so there is no use whatsoever in wasting either my time or yours in purely geographical descriptions. And in the third place you ought to be bright enough to comprehend by this time just what I think about love letters anyway. I have told you once that I love you and that ought to be enough. People like myself do not change. I may not talk quite as much as other people, but when I once say a thing I mean it. You will never have cause, I assure you, to worry about my fidelity. I will honestly try to write you every Sunday these next six weeks, but I am not willing to literally promise even that. Mother indeed thinks that we ought not to write very much at all until our engagement is formally announced. Trusting that your rheumatism is very much better this morning, I am hastily yours, Cornelia. PS, apropos of your sentimental passion for letters, I enclose a ridiculous circular which was handed to me yesterday at the woman's exchange. You had better investigate it. It seems to be rather your kind. As the letter fluttered out of his hand, Stanton closed his eyes with a twitch of physical suffering. Then he picked up the letter again and scrutinized it very carefully from the severe silver monogram to the huge gothic signature, but he could not find one single thing that he was looking for. Not a nourishing paragraph, not a stimulating sentence, not even so much as one small sweet-flavored word that was worth filtering out of the prosy text to tuck away in the pockets of his mind for his memory to munch on in its hungry hours. Now everybody who knows anything at all knows perfectly well that even a business letter does not deserve the paper which it is written on unless it contains at least one significant phrase that is worth waking up in the night to remember and think about. And as to the lover who does not write significant phrases, Heaven help the young mate who finds himself thus mismated to, so spiritually commonplace in nature. Baffled, perplexed, strangely uneasy, Stanton Lannes studied the baron page before him. Then suddenly his poor heart puckered up like a persimmon with a ghastly grim shock which a man experiences when he realizes for the first time that the woman whom he loves is not shy, but stingy. With snow and gloom and pain and loneliness the rest of the day dragged by, hour after hour helpless, hopeless, utterly impotent as though time itself were bleeding to death, the minutes bubbled and dripped from the old wooden clock. By noon the room was as murky as dish-water and Stanton lay and frutted in the messy, sudsy snow-light like a forgotten knife or spoon until the janitor wandered casually in about three o'clock and wrung a piercing little wisp of flame out of the electric light bulb over the sick man's head and raised him clumsily out of his soggy pillows and fed him indolently with a sad, thin soup. Worst of all, four times in the dreadful interim between breakfast and supper the postman's three-leaf-foot step soared up the long metallic stairway like an ecstatically towering high note only to flat off discordantly at Stanton's door, without even so much as a one-cent advertisement issuing from the letter's slide. And there would be thirty or forty more days just like this, the doctor had assured him, and Cornelia had said that, perhaps if she felt like it, she would write six times. Then night came down like the feathery suit of a smoky lamp and smutted first the bed quilt, then the hearth rug, then the window seat, and then at last the great stormy faraway outside world. But sleep did not come. Oh no, nothing new came at all except that particularly wretched itching type of insomnia which seems to rip away from one's body the whole kind protecting skin and expose all the raw ticklish fretwork of nerves to the mercy of a gritty blanket or a wrinkled sheet. Pain came, too, in its most brutally high night tide and sweat like the smothered furs in summer, and thirst like the scrape of hot sandpaper and chill like the clammy horror of raw fish. Then, just as the mockish gold-crayed dawn came nosing over the house tops and the poor fellow's mind had reached the point where the slam of a window or the ripping creak of a floorboard would have shattered his brittle nerves into a thousand cursing tortures. Then that teasing, tantalizing little friend of all rheumatic invalids, the morning nap came swooping down upon him like a sponge and wiped out of his face every single bit of the sharp precious evidence of pain which he had been accumulating so laboriously all night long to present the doctor as an incontestable argument in favor of an opiate. Wighter than his rumpled bed but freshened and brightened and deceptively free from pain, he woke at last to find the pleasant yellow sunshine modeling his dingy carpet like a tortoise shell cat. Instinctively, with his first yawn he returned to consciousness, he reached back under his pillow for Cornelia's letter. Out of the stiff envelope fluttered instead the tiny circular to which Cornelia had referred so scathingly. It was a dainty bit of gray Japanese tissue with a crimson inked text glowing gaily across it. Something in the whole color scheme in the riotously quirky topography suggested at once the audaciously original work of some young art student who was fairly splashing her way along the road to financial independence, if not to fame. And this is what the little circular said, flushing redder and redder and redder with which ingenious statement. The Syria letter company, comfort and entertainment furnished four invalids, travelers and all lonely people, real letters from imaginary persons, reliable as your daily paper, fanciful as your favorite story magazine, personal as a message from your best friend, offering all the satisfaction of receiving letters with no possible obligation or even opportunity of answering them. Samplist. Letters from a Japanese fairy, bi-weekly, especially acceptable to a sick child, fragrant with incense and sandalwood, vivid with purple and orange and scarlet, lavishly interspersed with the most adorable Japanese toys that you ever saw in your life. Letters from a little son, weekly, very sturdy, very spunky, slightly profane. Letters from a little daughter, weekly, quaint, old-fashioned, daintily dreamy, mostly about dolls. Letters from a Banda Sea pirate, monthly, luxuriently tropical, saltier than the sea, sharper than coral, unmitigatedly murderous, altogether blood-curdling. Letters from a great blush-squirrel, irregular, sure to please nature lovers of either sex, pungent with woodlore, prowley, scampery, deliciously wild, apt to be just a little bit messy perhaps with roots and leaves and nuts. Letters from your favorite historical character, fortnightly, biographically consistent, historically reasonable, most vivaciously human, really unique. Love letters, daily, three grades, shy, medium, very intense. In ordering letters kindly state approximate age, prevalent, tastes, and in case of invalidism, the presumable severative illness, for priceless, etc., refer to opposite page. Address all communications to serial letter company, box, etc., etc. As Stanton finished reading the last solemn business detail, he crumpled up the circular into little grey wad and pressed his blonde head back into the pillows and grinned and grinned. Good enough, he chuckled, if Cornelia won't write to me, there seems to be lots of other congenial souls who will, cannibals and rodents and kitties, all the same, he ruminated suddenly, all the same alwager that there's an awfully decent little brain working away behind all that red ink and nonsense. Still grinning, he conjured up the vision of some grim-faced, spinster subscriber in a desolate counter-town, starting out at last for the first time in her life with real cheery self-importance, rain or shine to join the laughing, jostling, deliriously human Saturday night crowd at the village post office, herself the only person who's expected let her never fail to come. From squirrel or pirate or hopping hot and torn, what did it matter to her? Just the envelope alone was worth the price of the subscription. How the pink cheeked high school girls elbowed each other to get a peep at the post-mark. How the... better still, perhaps some hopelessly unpopular man in a dingy city office would go running up the last steps, just a little wee bit faster, say the second and fourth Mondays in the month, because of even a bought made-up letter from Mary Coon of Scots that he knew absolutely without slip or blunder would be waiting there for him, on his dusty ink stained desk among all the litter of bills and invoices concerning shoe leather. Whether Mary Coon of Scots praddled pert live ancient English politics or whimpered piteously about dull-coloured modern fashions, what did it matter so long as the letter came and smelled a faded Florida Lee or of Darnley's tobacco smoke? Altogether pleased by the vividness of both these pictures, Stanton turned quite amiably to his breakfast and gulped down a lukewarm bowl of milk without half his usual complaint. It was almost noon before his troubles commenced again. Then, like a raging hot tide, the pain began in the soft, fleshy soles of his feet and mounted up inch by inch through the calves of his legs, through his aching thighs, through his tortured back, through his cringing neck till the whole reeking misery seemed to foam and froth in his brain in an utter frenzy of furious resentment. Again the day dragged by with maddening monotony and loneliness. Again the clock mocked him and the postman shirked him and the janitor forgot him. Again the big black knight came crowding down and stung him and smothered him into a countless number of new torments. Again the treacherous morning nap wiped out all traces of the pain and left the doctor still mercilessly obdurate on the subject of an opiate. And Cornelia did not write. Not till the fifth day did a brief little southern note arrive informing him of the ordinary vital truths concerning a comfortable journey and expressing a chaste hope that he would not forget her. Not even surprise, not even curiosity, tempted Stanton to wait twice through the fashionable angular handwriting. Dolly impersonal, bleak as the shadow of a brown leaf across a block of grey granite, plainly unforgivably, written with ink and ink only, the stupid, loveless page slipped from his fingers to the floor. After the long waiting and the fretful impatience of the past few days, there were only two plausible ways in which to treat such a letter. One way was with anger, one way was with amusement. With conscientious effort Stanton finally summoned a real smile to his lips. Stretching out perilously from his snug bed, he gathered the waist basket into his arms and commenced to dig in it like a sportive terrier. After a messy minute or two, he successfully excavated the crumpled little grey tissue circular and smoothed it out carefully on his hummed-up knees. The expression in his eyes all the time was quite a mixture of risk-chief and malice and rheumatism. After all, he reasoned out of one corner of his mouth. After all, perhaps I have misjudged Cornelia. Maybe it's only that she really doesn't know just what a love letter ought to be like. Then with a slobbering fountain pen and a few exclamations he proceeded to write out a rather large check and a very small note. To the serial letter company, he addressed himself brazenly. For the enclosed check which you will notice doubles the amount of your advertised price. Kindly enter my name for a six weeks special edition deluxe subscription to one of your love letter serials. Any old ardour that comes most convenient. Approximate age of victim 32. Business status rubber broker. Preval in tastes. To be able to sit up and eat and drink and smoke and go to the office the way other fellows do. Nature of illness. The meanest kind of rheumatism. Kindly deliver said letters as early and often as possible. Very truly yours, etc. Sorrowfully then for a moment he studied the depleted balance in his checkbook. Of course, he argued, not unguiltily. Of course, that check was just the amount that I was planning to spend on a turquoise studded belt for Cornelia's birthday. But if Cornelia's brains really need more adorning than does her body, if this special investment, in fact, will mean more to both of us in the long run, then a dozen turquoise belts. Big and bland and blonde and beautiful. Cornelia's physical personality loomed up suddenly in his memory. So big in fact, so bland, so blonde, so splendidly beautiful, that he realized abruptly with a strange little tucked feeling in his heart that the question of Cornelia's brains had never yet occurred to him. Pushing the thought impatiently aside, he sank back luxuriently again into his pillows, and grinned without any perceptible effort at all as he planned adroitly how he would paste the serial love letters one by one into the gaudiest looking scrapbook that he could find and present it to Cornelia on her birthday as a textbook for the newly engaged girl. And he hoped and prayed with all his heart that every individual letter would be printed with crimson ink on a violet-scented page and would fairly rake from date to signature with all the joyous ecstatic silliness that graces either an old-fashioned novel or a modern breach of promise suit. So quite worn out at last with all this unwanted excitement, he drowsed up to sleep for as long as ten minutes and dreamed that he was a bigamist. The next day and the next night were stale and mean and musty with a drizzling winter rain, but the following morning crashed inconsiderately into the world's limp face like a snowball spiked with icicles. Gasping for breath and crunching for foothold, the sidewalk people breasted the gritty cold. Puckered with chills and goose flesh, the fireside people huddled and sneezed around their respective hearths. Shivering like the argue between his cotton flannel blankets, Stanton's courage fairly raced the mercury needs downward course. By noon his teeth were chattering like a mouthful of cracked ice. By night the sob in his thirsty throat was like a lump of salt and snow. But nothing outdoors or in from morning till night was half as wretchedly cold and clammy as a rapidly congealing hot water bottled at slopped and gurgled between his aching shoulders. It was just after supper when a messenger boy blurted in from the frigid hall with a great gust of cold and a long pasted-board box and a letter. Frowning with perplexity Stanton's clumsy fingers finally dislodged from the box a big soft blanket wrapper with an astonishingly strange blurry pattern of green and red against a somber background of rusty black. With increasing amazement he picked up the accompanying letter and scanned it hastily. Dear lad, the letter began quite intimately. But it was not signed Cornelia. It was signed Molly. End of Chapter 1. Chapter 2 of Molly Make Belief This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Molly Make Belief by Ileanor Hallowell Abbott Chapter 2. Turning nervously back to the box's wrapping paper, Stanton read once more the perfectly plain, perfectly unmistakable name and address, his own, repeated in absolute duplicate on the envelope. Quicker than his mental comprehension, mere physical embarrassment began to flush across his cheekbones. Then suddenly the whole truth dawned on him. The first installment of his serial love letter had arrived. But I thought, I thought it would be type-written, his stammered miserably to himself. I thought it would be a, be a hectograph, kind of a thing. Why hang it all? It's a real letter. And when I doubled my check and called for a special addition deluxe, I wasn't sitting up on my hind legs begging for real presents. But dear Lad persisted the pleasant round almost childish handwriting. Dear Lad, I could have cried yesterday when I got your letter telling me how sick you were. Yes. But crying wouldn't comfort you any, would it? So just to send you right off quick something to prove that I'm thinking of you, here's a great rollicking woolly wrapper to keep you snug and warm this very night. I wonder if it would interest you any at all to know that it is made out of a most larksome outlaw up on my grandfather's sweet meadowed farm. A really truly black sheep that I've raised all my own sweaters and mittens on for the past five years. Only it takes two whole seasons to raise a blanket wrapper, so please be awfully much delighted with it. And oh, Mr. Sick Boy, when you look at the funny blurry colors, couldn't you just please pretend that the tinge of green is the flavor of pleasant pastures, and that the streak of red is the cardinal flower that blazed along the edge of the noisy brook? Goodbye till tomorrow, Molly. With a face so altogether crowded with astonishment that there was no room left in it for pain, Stanton's lame fingers reached out inquisitively and patted the warm woolly fabric. Nice old Lambie, he acknowledged judicially. Then suddenly round the corners of his underlip, a little bulky smile began to flicker. Of course I'll save the letter for Cornelia, he protested. But no one could really expect me to paste such a scrumptious blanket wrapper into his scrapbook. Laboriously wriggling his thinness and his coldness into the black sheep's luxuriant irresponsible fleece, a bulging side pocket in the wrapper bruised his hip. Reaching down very temperishly to the pocket, he drew forth a small lace-streamed handkerchief, knotted pudgily across a brimming handful of fur-ballsome needles. Like a scorching hot August breeze, the magic woodsy fragrance crinkled through his nostrils. These people certainly know how to play the game all right, he reasoned whimsically, noting even the consistent little letter M, embroidered in one corner of the handkerchief. Then, because he was really very sick and really very tired, he snuggled down into the new blasted warmth and turned his gaunt cheek to the pillow and cupped his hand for sleep like a drowsy child with its nose and mouth burrowed eagerly down into the expectant draught. But the cup did not fill. Yet, scented deep in his curved, empty, balsam scented fingers lurked somehow somewhere the drags of a wonderful dream, boyhood with a hot, sweet flutter of summer woods and the pillowing warmth of the soft sun-baked earth and the crackle of a twig and the call of a bird and the drone of a bee and the great blue-blue mystery of the sky glinting down through a green-laddest canopy overhead. For the first time in a whole, cruel, torturous week, he actually smiled his way into his morning nap. When he woke again, both the sun and the doctor were staring pleasantly into his face. You look better, said the doctor, and more than that, you don't look half so cussed cross. Sure, grinned Stanton, with all the deceptive, undauntable optimism of the just awakened. Nevertheless, continued the doctor more soberly, there ought to be somebody a trifle more interested in you, than the janitor to look after your food and your medicine, and all that. I'm going to send you a nurse. Oh no, gasped Stanton. I don't need one, and frankly I can't afford one. Shy as a girl, his eyes eluded the doctor's frank stare. You see, he explained evidently, you see I'm just engaged to be married, and though business is fairly good and all that, my being away from the office six or eight weeks is going to cut like the do's into my commissions, and roses cost such a horrid price last fall, and there seems to be a game-long diamonds this year, they practically fine you for buying them, and... The doctors face brightened irrelevantally. Is she a Boston young lady? he queried. Oh yes, bimped Stanton. Good, said the doctor. Then of course she can keep some sort of an eye on you. I'd like to see her. I'd like to talk with her, give her just a few general directions as it were. A flush deeper than any mere love embarrassment spread suddenly over Stanton's face. She isn't here, he acknowledged, with barely analyzable mortification. She's just gone south. Just gone south? repeated the doctor. You don't mean since you've been sick. Stanton nodded with a rather wobbly grin, and the doctor changed the subject abruptly and visit himself quickly with the least bad-tasting medicine that he could concoct. Then left alone once more with a short breakfast and a long morning, Stanton sank back gradually into a depression infinitely deeper than his pillows, in which he seemed to realize with bitter contrition that in some strange unintentional manner his purely innocent matter-of-fact statement that Cornelia had just gone south had assumed the gigantic disloyalty of a public proclamation that the lady of his choice was not quite up to the accepted standard of feminine intelligence or affections. Though to save his life he could not recall any single glumward or gloomy gesture that could possibly have conveyed any such erroneous impression to the doctor. Why, Cornelia had to go south, he reasoned conscientiously. Every girl like Cornelia had to go south sometime between November and March. How could any a mere man even hope to keep rare choice exquisite creatures like that, cooped up in a slushy snowy New England city, when all the bright gorgeous rose-blooming south was waiting for them with open arms. Open arms! Apparently it was only climates that were allowed any such privileges with girls like Cornelia. Yet, after all, wasn't it just exactly that very quality of serene, dignified aloofness that had attracted him first to Cornelia among the score of rear-mannered girls of his acquaintance? Glumly reverting to his morning paper, he began to read and reread with dogged persistence each item of politics and foreign news, each gibbering advertisement. At noon the postman dropped some kind of a message through the slit in the door, but the plainly discernable green one-cent stamp forbade any possible hope that it was a letter from the south. At four o'clock again someone thrust an offensive pink gas bill through the letter slide. At six o'clock Stanton stubbornly shut his eyes up perfectly tight and muffled his ears in the pillow so that he would not even know whether the postman came or not. The only thing that finally roused him to plain grown-up sense again was the joggle at the janitor's foot, kicking mercilessly against the bed. Here's your supper, growled the janitor. On the bare tin tray, tucked in between the cup of gruel and the slice of toast, loomed an envelope, a real, rather fat-looking envelope. Instantly from Stanton's mind vanished every conceivable sad thought concerning Cornelia. With his heart thumping like the heart of any love-sick schoolgirl, he reached out and grabbed what he was supposed to was Cornelia's letter. But it was postmarked Boston, and the handwriting was quite plainly the handwriting of the Syria Letter Company. Mottering an exclamation that was not altogether pretty, he threw the letter as far as he could throw it out into the middle of the floor, and turning back to his supper began to crunch his toast furiously like a dragon crunching bones. At nine o'clock he was still awake. At ten o'clock he was still awake. At eleven o'clock he was still awake. At twelve o'clock he was still awake. At one o'clock he was almost crazy. By quarter past one, as though fairly hypnotized, his eyes began to rivet themselves on the little bright spot in the rug where the Syria Letter lay gleaming whitely in a beam of electric light from the street. Finally, in one supreme childish impulse of petulant curiosity, he scrambled shiveringly out of his blankets with many o's and ouches, recaptured the letter and took it growlingly back to his warm bed. Worn out quite as much with the grinding monotony of his rheumatic pains as with their actual acuteness, the nudist comfort of straining his eyes under the feeble rays of his nightlight seemed almost a pleasant diversion. The envelope was certainly fat as he ripped it open three or four folded papers like sleeping powders all duly numbered one a.m., two a.m., three a.m., four a.m., fell out of it. With increasing inquisitiveness he drew forth the letter itself. Dear Honey, said the letter quite boldly. Observe as it was the phrase crinkled Stanton's heart just the mirror's trifle. Dear Honey, there are so many things about your sickness that worry me. Yes, there are. I worry about your pain. I worry about the horrid food that you're probably getting. I worry about the coldness of your room. But most of anything in the world I worry about your sleeplessness. Of course you don't sleep. That's the trouble with rheumatism. It's such an old night-nagger. Now do you know what I'm going to do to you? I'm going to evolve myself into a sort of a rheumatic night's entertainment for the sole and explicit purpose of trying to while away some of your long, dark hours. Because if you've simply got to stay awake all night long and think, you might just as well be thinking about me, Carl Stanton. What? Do you dare smile and suggest for a moment that just because of the absence between us I cannot make myself vivid to you? Ho, silly boy! Don't you know that the plainest sort of black ink throbs more than some blood? And the touch of the softest hand is a harsh caress compared to the touch of a reasonably shrewd pen? Here now, I say, this very moment lift this letter of mine to your face and swear if you're honestly able to that you can't smell the rose in my hair. A cinnamon rose, would you say? A yellow flat-faced cinnamon rose? Not quite so lusciously fragrant as those in your grandmother's July garden? A trifle paler? Perceptibly cooler? Something forced into blossom perhaps behind a brittle glass under barren winter moonshine? And yet, ah-ha-ha, hear me laugh. You didn't really mean to let yourself lift the page and smell it, did you? But what did I tell you? I mustn't waste too much time, though, on this nonsense. What I really wanted to say to you was, here are four not sleeping potions, but waking potions. Just four silly little bits of news for you to think about at one o'clock and two and three and four if you happen to be so miserable tonight as to be awake even then, with my love, Molly. Whimsically Stanton rummaged round in the creases of the bedspread and extricated, the little folded paper marked number one o'clock. The news in it was utterly brief. My hair is red, was all that it announced. With a sniff of amusement Stanton collapsed again into his pillows. For almost an hour then he lay considering solemnly whether a red-headed girl could possibly be pretty. By two o'clock he had finally visualized quite a striking, Juno-esque type of beauty with a figure about the regal height of Cornelias and blue eyes perhaps just a trifle hazier and more mischievous. But the little folded paper marked number two o'clock announced destructively, my eyes are brown and I am very little. With an absurdly resolute intention to play the game, every bit as genuinely as Miss Syria Letter Company was playing it, Stanton refrained quite heroically from opening the third dose of news until at least two big Resonats city clocks had insisted that the hour was ripe. By that time the grin in his face was almost bright enough of itself to illuminate any ordinary page. I am lame, confided the third message somewhat depressingly. Then snuggling in parenthesis like the tickle of lips against his ear whispered the one phrase, my picture is in the fourth paper if you should happen still to be awake at four o'clock. Where now was Stanton's boasted sense of honour concerning the ethics of playing the game according to directions. Wait a whole hour to see what Molly looked like? Well, he guessed not. Fumbling frantically under his pillow and across the medicine stand he began to search for the missing number four o'clock. Quite out of breath at last he discovered it lying on the floor a whole arms length away from the bed. Only with a really acute stab of pain did he finally succeed in reaching it. Then with fingers fairly trembling with effort he opened forth and disclosed a tiny snapshot photograph of a grimve jawed scrawny necked much bespectacled elderly dame with a huge grey pompadour. Stung, said Stanton, rudmatism or anger or something buzzed in his heart like a bee the rest of the night. Fortunately in the very first mail the next morning a postal card from Cornelia such a pretty postal card too with a bright coloured picture of an inordinately riggy looking ostrich staring over a neat wire fence at an eager group of unmistakably northern tourists. Underneath the picture was written in Cornelia's own precious hand the heart-thrilling information. We went to see the ostrich farm yesterday. It was really very interesting. For quite a long time Stanton Lynn considered the match erjudically from every possible point of view. It would have been rather pleasant, he mused, to know who we were. Almost childishly his face cuddled into the pillow. She might at least have told me the name of the ostrich. He smiled grimly. Thus quite utterly denied any nourishing Cornelia-flavoured food for his thoughts. His hungry mind reverted very naturally to the tantalizing evasive sweetly spicy fragrance of the Molly episode, before the really dreadful photograph of the unhappy spinster lady had burst upon his blinking vision. Scowlingly he picked up the picture and stared and stared at it. Certainly it was grim. But even from its grimness emanated the same faint mysterious odor of cinnamon roses that lurked in the accompanying letter. There are some dreadful mistakes somewhere, he insisted. Then suddenly he began to laugh and reaching out once more for pen and paper inscribed his second letter and his first complaint to the Syria Letter Company. To the Syria Letter Company, he wrote sternly, with many ferocious tremors of dignity and rheumatism, kindly allow me to call attention to the fact that in my recent order of the 18th the specifications distinctly stated love letters and not any correspondence whatsoever, no matter how exhilarating, from either a gray plush squirrel or a band a sea pirate is evidenced by enclosed photograph which I am hereby returning. Please refund the money at once or forward me without delay, a consistent photograph of a special edition deluxe girl. Very truly yours. The letter was mailed by the janitor long before noon. Even as late as eleven o'clock that night, Stanton was still hopefully expecting an answer. Nor was he altogether disappointed. Just before midnight a messenger boy appeared with a fair-sized manila envelope, quite stiff and important looking. Oh, please, sir, said the enclosed letter. Oh, please, sir, we cannot refund your subscription money, because we have spent it. But if you will only be patient, we feel quite certain that you will be altogether satisfied in the long run with the material offered you. As for the photograph recently forwarded to you, kindly accept our apologies for a very clumsy mistake made here in the office. Do any of these other types suit you better? Kindly mark selection and return all pictures at your earliest convenience. Before the messenger boy's astonished interest, Stanton spread out on the bed all around him a dozen soft, sepia-coloured photographs of a dozen different girls. Stately and statin or simple in gingham, or deliciously hoidonish in fishing clothes, they challenged his surprised attention. Blonde, brunette, tall, short, posing with wistful tenderness in the flickering glow of an open fire, or smiling frankly out of a purely conventional vignette, they won and all defied him to choose between them. Oh, oh, laughed Stanton himself. Am I to try and separate her picture from eleven pictures of her friends? So that's the game, is it? Well, I guess not. Does she think I'm going to risk choosing a tomboy girl if the gentle little creature with a pen sees is really herself? Or, suppose, she truly is the enchanting little tomboy, would she probably write me any more nice funny letters if I solemnly selected her sentimental, moony-looking friend at the heavily draped window? Craftily he returned all the pictures unmarked to the envelope, and changing the address hurried the messenger off to re-mail it. Just this little note hasteless scribbled in pencil went with the envelope. Dear serial letter company, the pictures are not altogether satisfactory. It isn't a type that I am looking for, but a definite likeness of Molly herself. Kindly rectify the mistake without further delay, or refund the money. Almost all the rest of the night he amused himself chuckling to think how the terrible threat about refunding the money would confuse and conquer the extravagant little art student. But it was his own hands that did the nervous trembling when he opened the big express package that arrived the next evening, just as his tiresome porridge supper was finished. Ah, sweetheart! said the dainty note tucked inside the package. Ah, sweetheart, the little god of love be praised for one true lover, yourself. So it is a picture of me that you want, the real me, the truly me, no mere pink and white likeness, no actual proof even of seared and yellow age, no curly-haired, coquettish attractiveness that the shampoo lady in the photograph man trapped me into for that one single second, no deceptive profile of the best side of my face, and I perhaps blind in the other eye, not even a fair, honest, everyday portrait of my fathers and mothers' composite features, but a picture of myself. Hooray for you! A picture, then, not of my physiognomy, but of my personality. Very well, sir. Here is the portrait, true to the life in this great, clumsy, conglomerate package of articles that represent, perhaps, not even so much the prose illiteral things that I am, as the much more illuminating and significant things that I would like to be. It's what we would like to be that really tells most about us, isn't it, Carl Stanton? The brown that I have to wear talks loudly enough, for instance, about the color of my complexion, but the forbidden pink that I most crave whispers infinitely more intimately concerning the color of my spirit. And as to my face, am I really obliged to have a face? Oh no! Songs without words are surely the only songs in the world that are picked to the last lilting note with utterly limitless meanings. So in these letters without faces I cast myself quite serenely upon the mercy of your imagination. What's that you say? That I've simply got to have a face? Oh darn! Well, do your worst. Conjure up for me then, here and now, any sort of features whatsoever that please your fancy. Only, men of mine, just remember this in your imaginings. Gift me with beauty, if you like, or gift me with brains, but do not make the crude masculine mistake of gifting me with both. Thought furrows faces, you know, and after adolescence, only inanity retains its heavenly smoothness. Beauty, even at its worst, is a gorgeously perfect flower-sprinkled lawn over which the most ordinary everyday errands of life cannot cross without scarring. And brains at their best are only a plowed field teeming always and forever with the worries of incalculable harvests. Make me a little pretty, if you like, and a little wise, but not too much of either, if you value the verities of your vision. There, I say, do your worst. Make me that face, and that face only, that you need the most in all this big lonesome world, food for your heart, or fragrance for your nostrils. Only, one face or another, I insist upon having red hair. Molly With his lower lip twisted oddly under the bite of his strong white teeth, Stanton began to unwrap the various packages that comprised the large bundle. If it was a portrait, it certainly represented a puzzle picture. First, there was a small, flat-footed scarlet slipper with a fluffy gold toe to it. Definitely feminine, definitely small, so much for that. Then there was a slingshot, ferociously stubby, and rather confusingly boish. After that round and flat and tantalizing as an empty plate, the photograph disc of a totally unfamiliar song. The seagulls cry, a clue surely to neither age nor sex, but indicative possibly of musical preference or mere individual temperament. After that a tiny geographical globe with Kipling's phrase. For to admire and for to see, for to be old as world so wide, it never done no good to me, but I can't drop it if I tried. Written slantingly in very black ink across both hemispheres. Then an empty purse with a hole in it, a silver embroidered gauntlet such as horsemen wear on the Mexican frontier, a white table doily partly embroidered with silky blue forget-me-nots, the threaded needle still jabbed in the work, and the small thimble, stenton could have sworn, still warm from the snuggle of somebody's finger. Last of all, a fat and formidable addition of Robert Browning's poems, a tiny black domino mask, such as masqueraders wear, and a shimmering gilt picture frame in closing a pert yet not irreverent handmade adaptation of a certain portion of St. Paul's epistle to the Corinthians. Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not a sense of humor, I am become a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy and all knowledge, so that I could remove mountains, and have not a sense of humor, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not a sense of humor, it profiteth me nothing. A sense of humor re-suffers long and is kind, a sense of humor envyeth not, a sense of humor wanteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not its own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil. Beareth all things, believeeth all things, hopeeth all things, endureth all things. A sense of humor never faileth, but whether there be unpleasant prophecies they shall fail, whether there be scolding tongues they shall seize, whether there be unfortunate knowledge it shall vanish away. When I was a fault-finding child I spake as a fault-finding child, I understood as a fault-finding child, but when I became a woman I put away fault-finding things. And now, abideth faith, hope, charity these three, but the greatest of these is a sense of humor. With a little chuckle of amusement not altogether devoid of a very definite consciousness of being teased, stent and spread all the articles out of the bedspread before him, and tried to piece them together like the fragments of any other jigsaw puzzle. Was the young lady as intellectual as the Robert Browning poem suggested, or did she mean simply to imply that she wished she were, and did the tomboyish slingshot fit by any possible chance with a dainty feminine scrap of domestic embroidery? And was the empty purse supposed to be especially significant of an inordinate fondness for phonograph music, or what? Pondering, puzzling, fretting, fussing, he dozed off to sleep at last before he even knew that it was almost morning. And, when he finally woke again, he found the doctor laughing at him because he lay holding a scarlet slipper in his hand. Chapter 4 The next night, very, very late, in a furious riot of wind and snow and sleet, a clerk from the drug store just around the corner appeared with a perfectly huge hot water bottle, fairly sizzling and bubbling with warmth and relief for aching rheumatic backs. While wearing thunder, grown Stanton out of his cold and pain misery, search me, said the drug clerk, the order and the money for it came in the last mail this evening, kindly deliver a largest-sized hot water bottle, boiling hot, to Mr. Carl Stanton, eleven-thirty to-night. Gasp Stanton, ouch, gee, then, oh, I wish I could purr, as he settled cautiously back at last to toast his pains against the blessed scorching heat. Most girls, he reasoned with surprising interest, would have sent ice-cold violets shrouded in tissue paper. Now how does this special girl know? Oh, ouch, ouch, ouch, gee, he crooned himself to sleep. The next night, just at supper-time, a much-freckled messenger boy appeared, dragging and exceedingly, obstreperos fox-terrier on the end of a dangerously frayed leash. Planting himself firmly on the rug in the middle of the room, with the faintest gleam of saucy pink tongue showing between his teeth, the little beast sat and defied the entire situation. Nothing apparently but the correspondence concerning the situation was actually transferable from the freckled messenger boy to Stanton himself. Oh, dear lad, said the tiny note, I forgot to tell you my real name, didn't I? Well, my name and the dog's first name are just the same. Funny, isn't it? You'll find it in the back of almost any dictionary. With love, Molly. P.S., just turn the puppy out in the morning and he'll go home all right of his own accord. With his own pink tongue, showing just a truffle between his teeth, Stanton lay for a moment and watched the dog on the rug. Cocking his small, keen, wide head from one tippy angle to another, the little terrier returned to stare with an expression that was altogether and unmistakably mirthful. Oh, it's a jolly little beggar, isn't it? said Stanton. Come here, sir. Only a suddenly pointed ear acknowledged the summons. The dog himself did not budge. Come here, I say! Stanton repeated with harsh preemptoriness. Palpably the little dog winked at him. Then in succession the little dog dodged a droidly, a knife, a spoon, a copy of Browning's poems, and several other sizable articles from the table close to Stanton's elbow. Nothing but the dictionary seemed too big to throw. Finally, with a grin that could not be disguised, even from the dog, Stanton began to rummage with eye and hand through the intricate back pages of the dictionary. You silly little fool, he said. Won't you mind, unless you are spoken to by name? Aaron, Abbe-dell, Abiathar, he began to read out with petulant curiosity, Baldwin, Barrakeas, Bruno, Ohang, Cadwalader, Caesar, Caleb, what nonsense. Ephraim, Erasmus, how could a girl be named anything like that? Gabriel, Gerard, Gershom, imagine whistling a dog to the name of Gershom. Hannibal, Hezekiah, Hosea, oh hell. Stolledly, with unheedful drooping ears, the little fox terrier resumed his seat on the rug. Ichabod, Habez, Joab, Stanton's voice persisted experimentally. By nine o'clock, in all possible variations of accent and intonation, he had quite completely exhausted the alphabetical list as far as K, and the little dog was blinking himself to sleep on the far side of the room. Something about the dog's nodding contentment started Stanton's mouth to yawning, and for almost an hour he lay in the lovely restful consciousness of being at least half asleep. But at ten o'clock he roused up sharply and resumed the task at hand, which seemed suddenly to have assumed really vital importance. Laban, Lorenzo, Marcellus, he began again in a loud, clear, compelling voice. Marideth, did the little dog stir? Did he sit up? Marideth, Marideth, the little dog barked. Something in Stanton's brain flashed. It is Mary for the dog, he quizzed. Here, Mary! In another instant the little creature had leapt upon the foot of his bed and was talking away at a great rake, with all sorts of ecstatic grunts and growls. Stanton's hand went out shyly to the dog's head. So it's Molly Marideth, he mused, but after all there was no reason to be shy about it. It was the dog's head he was stroking. Tied to the little dog's collar when he went home the next morning was a tiny and conspicuous tag that said, That was easy, the pup's name, and yours is Marideth. Funny name for a dog, but nice for a girl. The serial letter company's letters were always prompt, even though perplexing. Dear lad, came this special answer. You are quite right about the dog, and I compliment you hardly on your shrewdness. But I must confess, even though it makes you very angry with me, that I have deceived you absolutely concerning my own name. Will you forgive me utterly if I hereby promise never to deceive you again? Why, what could I possibly possibly do with a great solemn name like Marideth? My truly name, sir, my really truly honest engine name is Molly Make-Believe. Don't you know the funny little old song about Molly Make-Believe? Oh, surely you do. Molly, Molly, Make-Believe, keep to your play if you would not grieve. For Molly Mine, here's a hint for you. Things that are true are apt to be blue. Now, you remember it, don't you? Then there's something about... Molly, Molly, make a smile, wear it, swear it all the while. Long as your lips are framed for a joke, who can prove that your heart is broke? Don't you love that is broke? Then there's the last verse, my favorite. Molly, Molly, make a bow, make him of mister, make him of snow. Long as your dream stays fine and fair. Molly, Molly, what do you care? Well, I'll wager that her name is Marideth just the same, Valdstenten, and she's probably madder than Scat to think that I hid it right. Whether the daily overtures from the serial letter company prove to be dogs or love letters or hot water bottles or funny old songs, it was reasonably evident that something unique was practically guaranteed to happen every single individual night of the six-week subscription contract. Like a youngsters' joyous dream of chronic Christmas Eve's, this realization alone was enough to put an absurdly delicious thrill of expectancy into any invalid's otherwise prosy thoughts. Yet the next bit of attention from the serial letter company did not please Stanton one-half as much as it embarrassed him. Wandering socially into the room from his own apartments below, a young lawyer friend of Stanton's had only just seated himself on the foot of Stanton's bed, when an expressman also arrived with two large paste-board hat boxes, which he straightway dumped on the bed between the two men, with a laconic message that he would call for them again in the morning. Heaven preserve me, gasp Stanton, what is this? Fierce umbly out of the smaller of the two boxes he lifted with much rustling snarl of tissue paper, a woman's brown fur hat, very soft, very fluffy, inordinately jaunty with a blush-pink rose nestling deep in the fur. Out of the other box, twice as large, twice as rustly, flaunted a green velvet cavalier's hat with a green ostrich feather as long as a man's arm drooping languidly off the brim. Holy cat! said Stanton. Pinned to the green hat's crown was a tiny note. The handwriting at least was pleasantly familiar by this time. Oh, I say! cried the lawyer delightedly. With a desperately painful effort of nonchalance, Stanton shoved his right fist into the brown hat and his left fist into the green one, and raised them quizzically from the bed. Darned, good-looking hats! he stammered. Oh, I say! repeated the lawyer with accumulative delight. Crimson to the tip of his ear, Stanton rolled his eyes frantically towards the little note. She sent him up just to show him to me, he quoted wildly, just because I'm laid up, so and can't get out on the streets to see the styles for myself, and I've got to choose between them for her, he ejaculated. She says she can't decide alone which one to keep. Bully for her, cried the lawyer, surprisingly slapping his knee. The cunning little girl, speechless with astonishment, Stanton then watched his visitor, then, well, which one would you choose? he asked, with unmistakable relief. The lawyer took the hats and scanned them carefully. Let me see, he considered. Her hair is so blonde. No, it's red, snapped Stanton. With perfect courtesy, the lawyer swallowed his mistake. Oh, excuse me, he said. I forgot. But with her height... She hasn't any height to groan, Stanton. I tell you, she's little. Choose to suit yourself, said the lawyer Cooley. He himself had admired Cornelia from afar off. The next night, to Stanton's mixed feelings of relief and disappointment, the surprise seemed to consist in the fact that nothing happened at all. Fully until midnight, the sense of relief comforted him utterly. But sometime after midnight, his hungry mind, like a house pet robbed of an accustomed meal, began to wake and fret and stalk around ferociously through the long, empty, aching, early morning hours, searching for something novel to think about. By suppertime the next evening he was in an irritable mood that made him fairly clutch the special delivery letter out of the postman's hand. It was rather a thin, tantalizing little letter, too. All it said was, Tonight, dearest, until one o'clock in a cabbage-colored gown all shimmery with green and blue and September frost lights, I'm going to sit up by my white birch wood fire and read aloud to you, yes, on a stinging and out of browning, too. Did you notice your copy was marked? What shall I read to you? Shall it be? If I could have that little head of hers painted upon a background of pale gold? Or shall I sonnet sing you about myself? Do I live in a house you would like to see? Or I am a painter who cannot paint, no end to all I cannot do, yet do one thing at least I can, love a man or hate a man. Or just escape me, never beloved, while I am I and you are you. Oh, honey, won't it be fun just you and I perhaps in all this big city sitting up and thinking about each other? Can you smell the white birch smoke in this letter? Almost unconsciously Stanton raised the page to his face. Unmistakably up from the paper rose a strong, vivid scent of a briar wood pipe. Well, I'll be hanged, growled Stanton, if I'm going to be strung by any boy. Out of all proportion the incident irritated him. But when the next evening a perfectly tremendous bunch of yellow junk wheels arrived with a penciled line suggesting, if you'll put these solid gold poses in your window tomorrow morning at eight o'clock, so I'll surely know just which window is yours, I'll look up when I go past. Stanton most preemptorily ordered the janitor to display the bouquet as ornately as possible along the narrow window sill of the biggest window that faced the street. Then all through the night he lay dozing and waking intermittently with a lovely scared feeling in the pit of his stomach that something really rather exciting was about to happen. By surely half past seven he rose laboriously from his bed, huddled himself into his black sheep wrapper, and settled himself down as warmly as could be expected, close to the draughty edge of the window. End of Chapter 4 Chapter 5 of Mollymake Believe This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Mollymake Believe by Ilinor Hallowell Abbott. Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Little and lame and red-haired and brown-eyed, he kept repeating to himself, old people and young people, cab drivers and jaunty young girls, and fat blue policemen looked up, one and all with quick brightening faces, at the really gorgeous spring-like flame of Johnquills. But in a whole chilly, wearisome hour, the only red-haired person that passed was an Irish-sutter puppy and the only lame person was a wooden-legged beggar. Cool and disgusted as he was, Stanton could not altogether help laughing at his own discomforture. Why hang that little girl? She ought to be spanked, he chuckled as he climbed back into his tiresome bed. Then as though to reward his ultimate good-nature. The very next male brought him a letter from Cornelia, and rather a remarkable letter too, as in addition to the usual impersonal comments on the weather and the tennis and the annual orange crop, there was actually one whole individual intimate sentence that distinguished the letter as having been intended solely for him, rather than for Cornelia's dressmaker or her coachman's invalid daughter or her own youngest brother. This was the sentence. Really, Carl, you don't know how glad I am that in spite of all your foolish objections I kept to my original purpose of not announcing my engagement until after my southern trip. You've no idea what a big difference it makes in a girl's good time at a great hotel like this. This sentence surely gave Stanton a good deal of food for his day's thoughts, but the mental indigestion that ensued was not altogether pleasant. Not until evening did his mood brighten again. Then, lad of mine, whispered Molly's gentler letter, lad of mine, how blonde your hair is. Even across the chin tickling tops of those yellow junk wheels this morning, I almost laughed to see the blonde blonde shine of you. Some day I'm going to stroke that hair. Yes. P.S., the little dog came home all right. With a gasp of dismay Stanton set up abruptly in bed and tried to re-visualize every single individual pedestrian who had passed his window in the vicinity of eight o'clock that morning. She evidently isn't lame at all, he argued, or little, or red-haired, or anything. Probably her name isn't Molly, and presumably it isn't even Meredith. But at least she did go by, and is my hair so very blonde? He asked himself suddenly. Against all intention his mouth began to prance a little at the corners. As soon as he could possibly summon the janitor he dispatched his third note to the serial letter company, for this one bore a distinctly sealed inner envelope directed for Molly, personal. And the message in it, though brief, was utterly to the point. Couldn't you please tell a fellow who you are? But by the conventional bedtime hour the next night he wished most heartily that he had not been so inquisitive, for the only entertainment that came to him at all was a junk-wheel-coloured telegram warning him, where the apple reddens do not pry lest we lose our eat and you and I. The couplet was quite unfamiliar to Stanton, but it rhymed sickeningly through his brain all night like the consciousness of an overdrawn bank account. It was the very next morning after this that all the Boston papers flaunted Cornelia's aristocratic young portrait on their front papers with a striking large type announcement that one of Boston's fairest debutantes makes a daring rescue in Florida waters. Hotel cook capsized from row boat owes his life to the pluck and endurance, etc., etc. With a great sob in his throat and every pulse pounding, Stanton lay and read the infinite details of a really splendid story. A group of young girls dallying on the pier, a shrill cry from the bay, the sudden panic-stricken helplessness of the spectators, and then with equal suddenness the plunge of a single feminine figure into the water, the long-hard swim, the furious struggle, the final victory. Stingingly as though it had been fairly branded into his eyes, he saw the vision of Cornelia's heroic young face battling above the horrible dragging-down depths of the bay. The bravery, the risk, the ghastly chances of a less fortunate ending sent shiver after shiver through his already tortured senses. All the loving thoughts in his nature fairly leapt to do tribute to Cornelia. Yes, he reasoned that Cornelia was made like that. No matter what the cost herself, no matter what was the price, Cornelia would never, never fail to do her duty. When he thought of the weary, lagging, riskful weeks that were still to ensue before he should actually see Cornelia again, he felt as though he should go utterly mad. The letter that he wrote to Cornelia that night was like a letter written in a man's own heartblood. His hand trembled so that he could scarcely hold the pen. Cornelia did not like the letter. She said so frankly. The letter did not seem to her quite nice. Certainly, she attested, it was not exactly that sort of letter that one would like to show once, mother. Then, in a palpably conscientious effort to be kind as well as just, she began to prattle inkily again about the pleasant, warm, sunny weather. Her only comment on saving the drowning man was the mere phrase that she was very glad that she had learned to be a good swimmer. Never indeed, since her absence, had she spoken of missing Stanton. Not even now, after what was inevitably a hard-wracking adventure, did she yield her lover one single iota of the information which he had a lover's right to claim. Had she been frightened, for instance, way down in the bottom of that serene heart of hers, had she been frightened? In the ensuing desperate struggle for life, had she struggled just one little tiny bit harder because Stanton was in that life? Now, in the dreadful, unstrung reaction of the adventure, did her whole nature awaken and yearn and cry out for that one heart in all the world that belonged to her? Plainly, by her silence in the matter, she did not intend to share anything as intimate, even as her fear of death with the man whom she claimed to love. It was just this last touch of deliberate selfish aloofness that startled Stanton's thoughts with the one persistent, brutally nagging question. After all, was a woman's undeniably glorious ability to save a drowning man the supreme requisite of a happy marriage? Day by day, night by night, hour by hour, minute by minute the question began to dig into Stanton's brain, throwing much dust and confusion into brain corners, otherwise perfectly orderly and sweet and clean. Week by week, grown suddenly and morbidly analytical, he watched for Cornelius' letters with increasingly passionate hopefulness, and met each fresh disappointment with increasingly passionate resentment. Except for the serial letter company's ingenuously varied attentions, there was practically nothing to help him make either day or night bearable. More and more, Cornelius' infrequent letter suggested exquisitely painted empty dishes offered to a starving person. More and more, Molly's whimsical messages fed and nourished him and joyously pleased him, like some nonsensically fashioned candy box that yet proved brimming full of real food for a real man. Fight as he would against it, he began to cherish a sense of furious annoyance that Cornelius' failure to provide for him had so thrust him out as it were to feed among strangers. With frowning perplexity and real worry he felt the tingling vivid consciousness of Molly's personality begin to permeate and impregnate his whole nature. Yet when he tried to acknowledge and thereby cancel his personal sense of obligation to this Molly by writing an exceptionally civil note of appreciation to the serial letter company, the serial letter company answered him tersely. Pray, do not thank us for the junk wheels, blanket wrapper, etc., etc. Surely they are merely presence from yourself to yourself. It is your money that bought them. And when he had replied briefly, well, thank you for your brains then. The company had persisted with undue sharpness. Don't thank us for our brains. Brains are our business. End of Chapter 5 Chapter 6 of Molly Make Believe This is the LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Molly Make Believe by Ilin or Hallowell Abbott. Chapter 6 It was one day, just about the end of the fifth week, that poor Stanton's long accumulated, long suppressed, perplexity blew up noisily just like any other kind of steam. It was the first day, too, throughout all his illness that he had made even the slightest pretext of being up and about. Slippered, if not booted, blanket-rappered, if not coated, shaven at least, if not shorn, he had established himself fairly comfortably, late in the afternoon, at his big study-table, close to the fire, where, in his low Morris chair, with his books and his papers and his lamp close at hand, he had started out once more to try and solve the absurd little problem that confronted him. Only an occasional twitch of pain in his shoulder blade, or an intermittent shudder of nerves along his spine, had interrupted in any possible ways almost frenzied absorption in his subject. Here at the desk, very soon after suppertime, the doctor had joined him, and with an unusual expression of leisure and friendliness, had settled down lollingly on the other side of the fireplace with his great square-toed shoes, nudging the bright, brassy edge of the fender, and his big merchant pipe, puffing the whole bleak room most deliciously, tantalizingly full of forbidden tobacco smoke. It was a comfortable, warm place to chat. The talk had begun with politics, drifted a little away toward the architecture of several new city buildings, hovered a moment over the marriage of some mutual friend, and then languished utterly. With a sudden narrowing-eyed shrewdness, the doctor turned and watched an unwanted flicker of worry on Stanton's forehead. What's bothering you, Stanton, he asked quickly? Surely you're not worrying any more about your rheumatism? No, said Stanton, it isn't rheumatism. For an instant, the two men's eyes held each other, and then Stanton began to laugh, a trifle uneasily. Doctor, he asked quite abruptly, doctor, do you believe that any possible conditions could exist? That would make it justifiable for a man to show a woman's love letter to another man. Why, yes, said the doctor cautiously, I think so. There might be circumstances. Still without any perceptible cause, Stanton laughed again and, reaching out, picked up a folded sheet of paper from the table and handed it to the doctor. Read that, will you, he asked, and read it out loud. With a slight protest of diffidence, the doctor unfolded the paper, scanned the page for an instant, and began slowly. Carl of mine, there's one thing I forgot to tell you. When you go to buy my engagement ring, I don't want any. No, I'd rather have two wedding rings instead, two perfectly plain gold wedding rings, and the ring for my passive left hand I want inscribed to be a sweetness more desired than spring, and the ring for my active right hand I want inscribed he's sold to keep, just that. And you needn't bother to write me that you don't understand because you are not expected to understand. It is not man's prerogative to understand, but you are perfectly welcome if you want to call me crazy because I am utterly crazy on just one subject, and that's you. Why, beloved, if—here! cried Stanton, suddenly reaching out and grabbing the letter. Here, you didn't read any more. His cheeks were crimson. The doctor's eyes focused sharply on his face. That girl loves you, said the doctor, tersely. For a moment then the doctor's lips puffed silently at his pipe, until at last, with an almost bashful gesture, he cried out abruptly. Stanton, somehow I feel as though I owed you an apology, or rather owed your fiancé one. Somehow, when you told me that day that your young lady had gone gadding off to Florida and left you alone with your sickness, why I thought, well, most evidently, I have misjudged her. Stanton's throat gave a little gasp, then silenced again. He bit his lips furiously, as though to hold back an exclamation. Then suddenly the whole perplexing truth burst forth from him. That isn't from my fiancé, he cried out. That's just a professional love letter. I'm by them by the dozen, so much a week. Reaching back under his pillow, he extricated another letter. This is from my fiancé, he said. Read it, yes, do. Allowed, gasped the doctor. Stanton nodded, his forehead was wet with sweat. Dear Carl, the weather is still very warm. I am riding horseback almost every morning, however, and playing tennis almost every afternoon. There seem to be an exceptionally large number of interesting people here this winter. In regard to the list of names you sent me for the wedding, really, Carl, I do not see how I can possibly accommodate so many of your friends, without seriously curtailing my own list. After all, you must remember that it is the bride's day, not the groom's. And in regard to your question as to whether we expect to be home for Christmas, and could I possibly arrange to spend Christmas Day with you? Why, Carl, you are perfectly preposterous. Of course it is very kind of you to invite me and all that, but how could Mother and I possibly come to your rooms when our engagement is not even announced? And besides, there's going to be a very smart dance here, Christmas Eve, that I particularly wish to attend. And there are plenty of Christmases coming for you and me. Quarterly yours, Cornelia. P.S., Mother and I hope that your rheumatism is much better. That's the girl who loves me, said Stanton, not unhumorously. Then suddenly all the muscles around his mouth tightened, like the facial muscles of a man who is hammering something. I mean it, he insisted. I mean it, absolutely. That's the girl who loves me. Silently the two men looked at each other for a second. Then they both burst out laughing. Oh yes, that's Stanton at last. I know it's funny. That's just the trouble with it. It's all together too funny. Out of a book on the table beside him he drew the thin gray and crimson circular of the serial letter company and handed it to the doctor. Then after moments rummaging around on the floor beside him he produced, with some difficulty, a long, a pasteboard box fairly bulging with papers and things. These are the communications from my make-believe girl, he confessed grinningly. Oh, of course they're not all letters, he hurried to explain. Here's a book on South America. I'm a rubber broker, you know, and of course I've always been keen enough about the New England end of my job, but I've never thought anything so very special about the South American end of it. But that girl, that make-believe girl, I mean, insists that I ought to know all about South America, so she sent me this book. And it's corking reading, too, all about funny things like eating monkeys and parrots and toasted guinea pigs and sleeping outdoors in black jungle nights under mosquito netting, mind you, as I protection against prowling panthers. And here's a queer little newspaper cutting that she sent me one blizzardy, Sunday telling all about some big violin maker who always went out into the forests himself, and chose his violin woods from the north side of the trees. Casual little item, you don't think anything about it at the moment, it probably isn't true. And to save your soul you couldn't tell what kind of trees violins are made out of anyway. But I'll wager that never again will you wake in the night to listen to the wind without thinking of the great storm-tossed, moaning, groaning, slow-tuffening forest trees learning to be violins. And here's a funny little old silver poringer that she gave me, she says, to make my old gray gruel taste shinier. And down at the bottom of the bowl, the ruthless little pirate, she's taken a knife or a pin or something and scratched the words, excellent child. But you know I never noticed that part of it at all till last week. You see I've only been eating down to the bottom of the bowl just about a week. And here's a catalogue of a boys' school, four or five catalogues in fact, that she sent me one evening and asked if I please wouldn't look them over right away and help her decide where to send her little brother. Why, man, it took me almost all night. If you get the athletics you want in one school, then likelier than not you sleep up on the manual training. And if they're going to schedule eight hours a week for Latin, why wearing creation? Shrugging his shoulders as though to shrug aside absolutely any possible further responsibility concerning little brother, Stanton began to dig down deeper into the box, then suddenly all the grin came back to his face. And here are some sample wallpapers that she sent me for our house, he confided, flushing. What do you think of that bronze one there with the peacock feathers? Say, old man, think of a library, and a canal, coal fire, and a big mahogany desk, and a red-haired girl sitting against that paper. And this sunshiney tint for a breakfast room isn't half bad, is it? Oh yes, and here are the timetables and all the pink and blue maps about Colorado and Arizona and the painted desert. If we can afford it, she writes, she wishes we could go to the painted desert on our wedding trip. But really, old man, you know it isn't such a frightfully expensive journey. Why, if you live New York on Wednesday, oh, hang it all, what's the use of showing you any more of this nonsense? He finished abruptly. With brutal haste he started cramming everything back into place. It is nothing but nonsense, he acknowledged conscientiously, nothing in the world except a box full of make-believe thoughts from a make-believe girl, and here he finished resolutely, are my own fiancés' thoughts concerning me. Out of his blanket-wrapper pocket he produced and spread out before the doctor's eyes five thin letters and a postal card. Not exactly thoughts concerning you, even so are they, quizzed the doctor. Stanton began to grin again. Well, thoughts concerning the weather, then, if that suits you any better. Twice the doctor swallowed audibly. Then? But it's hardly fair, is it, to weigh a box full of even the prettiest lies against five of even the slimmest real true letters, he asked dryly. But they're not lies, snaps Stanton. Surely you don't call anything a lie unless not only the fact is false, but the fancy also is maliciously distorted. Now take this case right before us. Suppose there isn't any little brother at all. Suppose there isn't any painted desert. Suppose there isn't any black sheep up on a grandfather's farm. Suppose there isn't anything. Suppose I say that every single individual fact stated is false. What earthly difference does it make so long as the fancy still remains the truest, realest, dearest, funniest thing that ever happened to a fellow in his life? Oh, ho! said the doctor. So that's the trouble, is it? It isn't just rheumatism that's keeping you thin and worried-looking, eh? It's only that you find yourself suddenly in the embarrassing predicament of being engaged to one girl and in love with another. No! cried Stanton frantically. No! That's the mischief of it, the very mischief. I don't even know that the serial letter company is a girl. Why, it might be an old lady, rather wombsickly inclined. Even the oldest lady I presume might very reasonably perfume her note-paper with cinnamon roses. It might even be a boy. One letter indeed smells very strongly of being a boy. And mighty good tobacco, too. And great heavens, what have I got to prove that it isn't even an old man, some poor old worn-out story-writer trying to ease out the ragged end of his years? Have you told your fiancee about it? Asked the doctor. Stanton's jaw dropped. Have I told my fiancee about it? He mocked. Why, it was she who sent me the circular in the first place. But tell her about it? Why, man, in ten thousand years, and then some how could I make any sane person understand? You're beginning to make me understand, confessed the doctor. Then you are no longer sane, scoffed Stanton. The crazy image of it has surely then taken possession of you, too. Why, how could I go to any sane person like Cornelia, and and Cornelia is the most absolutely hopelessly sane person you ever saw in your life? How could I go to any one like that and announce, Cornelia, if you find any perplexing change in me during your absence and your unconscious neglect? It is only that I have fallen quite madly in love with a person. Would you call it a person who doesn't even exist? Therefore, for the sake of this person who doesn't exist, I ask to be released. Oh, so you do ask to be released? Interrupted the doctor. Why, no, certainly not, insisted Stanton. Suppose the girl you love does hurt your feelings a little bit now and then, would any man go ahead and give up a real flesh and blood sweetheart for the sake of even the most wonderful paper-ending girl whom he was reading about in an unfinished serial story? Would he, I say? Would he? Yes, said the doctor soberly. Yes, I think he would, if what you call the paper-ending girl suggested suddenly an entirely new undreamed of vista of emotional and spiritual satisfaction. But I tell you, she's probably a boy, persisted Stanton doggedly. Well, why don't you go ahead and find out, quizzed the doctor. Find out, cried Stanton hotly. Find out. I'd like to know how anybody's going to find out when the only given address is a private post office box, and as far as I know there's no sex to a post office box. Find out, why, man, that basket over there's full of my letters returned to me because I tried to find out. The first time I asked, they answered me with just a teasing, snubbing telegram. But ever since then they've simply sent back my questions with a stern printed slip announcing, your letter of blank is hereby returned to you. Kindly allow us to call your attention to the fact that we are not running a correspondence bureau. Our circular distinctly states, etc. Sent to your printed slip, cried the doctor scoffingly, the love letter business must be thriving. Very evidently you are by no means the only importunate subscriber. O thunder! growled Stanton. The ideas seemed to be new to him and not altogether to his taste. Then suddenly his face began to brighten. No, I'm not lying, he said. No, they haven't always sent me a printed slip. It was only yesterday that they sent me a rather real sort of letter. You see, he explained, I got pretty mad at last, and I wrote them frankly and told them I didn't give a darn who Molly was, but simply wanted to know what she was. I told them it was just gratitude on my part, the most formal, impersonal sort of gratitude. A perfectly plausible desire to say thank you to someone who had been awfully decent to me these past few weeks. I said, right out that if she was a boy why would surely have to go fishing together in the spring, and if she was an old man the very least I could do would be to endow her with tobacco, and if she was an old lady why I'd simply be obliged to drop in now and then of a rainy evening and hold her knitting for her. And if she were a girl, probed the doctor. Stanton's mouth began to twitch. Then heaven help me, he laughed. Well, what answer did you get? persisted the doctor. What do you call a realish sort of letter? With palpable reluctance Stanton drew a great envelope out of the cuff of his wrapper. I suppose you might as well see the whole business, he admitted consciously. There was no special diffidence in the doctor's manner this time. His clutch on the letter was distinctly inquisitive, and he read out the opening sentences with almost rhetorical effect. Oh, Carl, dear, you silly boy, why do you persist in hectoring me so? Don't you understand that I've got only a certain amount of ingenuity anyway, and if you force me to use it all in trying to conceal my identity from you, how much shall I possibly have left to devise schemes for your amusement? Why do you persist, for instance, in wanting to see my face? Maybe I haven't got any face. Maybe I lost my face in a railroad accident. How do you suppose it would make me feel, then, to have you keep teasing and teasing? Oh, Carl, isn't it enough for me to tell you, once for all, that there is an insuperable obstacle in the way of our ever-meeting? Maybe I've got a husband who is cruel to me. Maybe, biggest obstacle of all, I've got a husband whom I am utterly devoted to. Maybe, instead of any of these things, I'm a poor old, wizened up, shut-in, tossing day and night on a very small bed of very big pain. Maybe worse than being sick, I'm starving, poor. And maybe worse than being sick or poor, I am most horribly tired of myself. Of course, if you are very young and very prancy and reasonably good-looking, and still are tired of yourself, you can almost always rest yourself by going on the stage where, with a little rouge and a different colored wig, and new nose and skirts instead of trousers or trousers instead of skirts, and age instead of youth, and badness instead of goodness, you can give your ego a perfectly limitless number of happy holidays. But, if you are oldish, I say, and pitifully shut-in, just how would you go to work I wanted to rest your personality? How, for instance, could you take your biggest, grayest, oldest worry about your doctor's bill and rouge it up into a radiant young joke? And how, for instance, out of your lonely, dreary, middle-aged orphanhood, are you going to find a way to short-skirt your rheumatic pains, and braiding, too, two perfectly huge pink-bowed pigtails, the hair that you haven't got, and cape around so ecstatically before the footlights that the old gentleman and lady in the front seat absolutely swear you to be the living image of their long-lost Amy? And how, if the farthest journey you ever will take again is the monotonous hand journey from your pillow to your medicine-bottle? Then how, for instance, with a map or tinsel or a tar of roses, can you go to work to solve, even just for your own satisfaction, the romantic, shimmering secrets of Morocco? Ah, you've got me now, you think. All decided in your mind that I am an aged invalid. I didn't say so, I just said maybe. Likelier than not, I've saved my climax for its proper place. How do you know, for instance, that I am not a colored person? So many people are. Without signature of any sort, the letter ended abruptly, then in there, and as though to satisfy his sense of something left unfinished, the doctor began at the beginning and read it all over again in a mumbling husky whisper. Maybe she is colored, he volunteered at last. Very likely, said Stanton perfectly cheerfully. It's just those occasional humorous suggestions that keep me keyed so heroically up to the point where I'm actually infuriated if you even suggest that I might be getting really interested in this mysterious Miss Molly. You haven't said a single sentimental thing about her that I haven't scoffed at now, have you? No, acknowledged the doctor. I can see that you've covered your retreat all right. Even if the author of these letters should turn out to be a one-legged veteran of the War of 1812, you still could say I told you so. But all the same, I'll wager that you'd gladly give a hundred dollars cash down if you could only go ahead and prove the little girl's actual existence. Stanton's shoulders squared suddenly, but his mouth retained at least a faint vestige of its original smile. You mistake the situation entirely, he said. It's the little girl's non-existence that I am most anxious to prove. Then utterly without reproach or interference he reached over and grabbed a forbidden cigar from the doctor's cigar case, and lighted it and retreated as far as possible into the gray film of smoke. It was minutes and minutes before either men spoke again. Then at last, after much crossing and recrossing of his knees, the doctor asked, drawingly, and when is it that you and Cornelia are planning to be married? Next April, said Stanton briefly, said the doctor. After a few more minutes he said, again. The second, seemed to irritate Stanton unduly. Is it your head that's spinning round? he asked, you sound like a Dutch top. The doctor raised his hands cautiously to his forehead. Your story does make me feel a little bit giddy, he acknowledged. Then with sudden intensity, Stanton, you're playing a dangerous game for an engaged man. Cut it out, I say. Cut what out? said Stanton stubbornly. The doctor pointed exasperately towards the big box of letters. Cut those out, he said, a sentimental correspondence with a girl who's more interesting than your fiancee. Few growled Stanton, I'll hardly stand for that statement. Well then lie down for it, taunted the doctor. Keep right on being sick and worried and preemptorily he reached out both hands toward the box. Here he insisted, let's dump the whole mischievous nonsense into the fire and burn it up. With an out of pain, Stanton knocked the doctor's hands away. Burn up my letters, he laughed. Well, I guess not. I wouldn't even burn up the wallpapers. I've had altogether too much fun out of them. And as for the books, the browning, etc., why hang it all, I've gotten awfully fond of those books. I'dly he picked up the South American volume and opened the flyly for the doctor to see. Carl from his molly, it said, quite distinctly. Oh yes, mumble the doctor, it looks very pleasant. There's absolutely no denying that it looks very pleasant. And someday, out of an old trunk or tucked down behind your library encyclopedias, your wife will discover the book and ask, blandly, who was Molly? I don't remember you ever saying anything about a Molly, just someone you used to know. And your answer will be innocent enough? No, dear, someone whom I never knew. But how about the pucker along your spine and the awfully foolish grinny feeling around your cheekbones? And on the street and in the cars and at the theaters, you'll always and forever be looking and searching and asking yourself, is it by any chance possible that this girl sitting next to me now? And your wife will keep saying, with just a barely perceptible edge in her voice, Carl, do you know that red-haired girl whom we just passed? You stared at her so, and you'll say, oh no, I was merely wondering if. Oh yes, you'll always and forever be wondering if. And mark my words, Denton, people who go about the world with even the most innocent chronic question in their eyes are pretty apt to run up against an unfortunately large number of wrong answers. But you take it also horribly seriously, protested, Denton, why, you rave and rant about it as though it was actually my affections that were involved. Your affections? cried the doctor in great exasperation. Your affections? Why, man, if it was only your affections, do you suppose I'd be wasting even so much as half a minute's worrying on you? But it's your imagination that's involved, that's where the blooming mischief lies. Affection is all right, affection is nothing but a nice, safe flame that feeds only on one special kind of fuel, its own particular object. You've got an affection for Cornelia, and wherever Cornelia fails to feed that affection, it is mercifully ordained that the starved flame shall go out into cold gray ashes without making any further trouble whatsoever. But you've got an imagination for this make-believe girl heaven help you, and an imagination is a great wild seething, insatiate, tongue of fire that, thwarted once and for all in its original desire to gorge itself with realities. We'll turn upon you, body and soul, and lick up your crackling fancy like so much kindling wood, and sear your common sense, and scorch your young wife's happiness. Nothing but Cornelia herself will ever make you want, Cornelia. But the other girl, the unknown girl, why, she's the face in the clouds, she's the voice in the sea, she's the glow of the sunset, she's the hush of the June twilight. Every summer breeze, every winter gale will fan the embers, every thumping, twittering, twanging pulse of an orchestra, every—oh, Stanton, I say, it isn't the ghost of the things that are dead that will ever come between you and Cornelia, but it never yet was the ghost of any lost thing that couldn't be tamed into a purring household pet. But the ghost of a thing that you've never yet found? That, I tell you, is a very different matter. Pounding at his heart and blazing in his cheeks, the insidious argument, the subtle justification that had been teeming in Stanton's veins all the week, burst suddenly into speech. But I gave Cornelia the chance to be all the world to me, he protested doggedly, and she didn't seem to care a hang about it. Great Scott, man, are you going to call a fellow unfaithful, because he hikes off into a corner now and then and reads a bit of Browning, for instance, all to himself, or wanders out on the piazza, some night all sold alone to stare at the stars that happen to bore his wife to extinction? But you'll never be able to read Browning again all by yourself, tongue to the doctor. Whether you buy it fresh from the presses or borrow it stale and old from a public library, you'll never find another copy as long as you live that doesn't smell of cinnamon roses. And as a stargazing or any other weird thing that your wife doesn't care for, you'll never go out alone any more into dawns or darknesses without the very tingling conscious presence of a wonder whether the other girl would have cared for it. Oh, shucks, said Stanton. Then suddenly his forehead procured up. Of course I've got a worry, he acknowledged frankly, any fellow's got a worry who finds himself engaged to be married to a girl who isn't keen enough about it to want to be all the world to him. But I don't know that even the most worried fellow has any real cause to be scared as long as the girl in question still remains the only flesh-and-blood girl on the face of the earth whom he wishes and did like him well enough to want to be all the world to him. The only flesh-and-blood girl scoffed the doctor. Oh, you're all right, Stanton. I like you and all that, but I'm mighty glad just to say that it isn't my daughter whom you're going to marry with all this molly make-believe nonsense lurking in the background. Cut it out, Stanton. I say, cut it out. Cut it out, you Stanton somewhat distraught. Cut it out? What, molly make-believe? Under the quick jerk of his knees the big box of letters and papers and things brimmed over in rustling froth across the whole surface of the table. Just for a second the muscles in his throat tightened a trifle. Then suddenly he burst out laughing, wildly, uproariously like an excited boy. Cut it out, he cried, but it's such a joke. Can't you see that it's nothing in the world except a perfectly delicious, perfectly intangible joke? Um, reiterated the doctor. In the very midst of his reiteration there came a sharp rap at the door and in answer to Stanton's cheerful permission to enter the so-called delicious intangible joke manifested itself abruptly in the person of a rather small feminine figure very heavily muffled up in a great black cloak and a rose-colored veil that shrouded her nose and chin bluntly, like the nose and chin of her face, only half viewed out as yet from a block of pink granite. It's only molly explained an undeniably sweet little alto voice. Am I interrupting you? End of CHAPTER 7 Jumping to his feet, the doctor stood staring wildly, from Stanton's amazed face to the perfectly calm, perfectly accustomed air of poise that characterized every movement of the pink shrouded visitor. The amazement, in fact, never wavered for a second from Stanton's blush-red visage nor the supreme serenity from the lady's whole attitude. But across the doctor's startled features a fearful, outraged consciousness of having been deceived warred mightily with a consciousness of unutterable mirth. Advancing toward the fireplace with a rather slow-footed, hesitating gate, the little visitor's attention focused suddenly on the cluttered table, and she cried out with unmistakable delight. Why? What are you people doing with all my letters and things? Then, climbing up on the sturdy brass fender, she thrust her pink impenetrable features right into the scared, pallid face of the shabby old clock and announced pointedly, it's almost half past seven, and I can stay till just eight o'clock. When she turned around again, the doctor was gone. With a tiny shrug of her shoulders she settled herself down then in a big high-backed chair before the fire and stretched out her overshoot toes to the shining edge of the fender. As far as any apparent self-consciousness was concerned, she might just as well have been all alone in the room. Convulsed with amusement yet almost paralyzed by a certain stubborn, dumb sort of embarrassment, nothing on earth could have forced Stanton into making even an indefinite speech to the girl until she had made at least one perfectly definite and reasonably illuminating sort of speech to him. Biting his grinning lips into as straight a line as possible, he gathered up the scattered pages of the evening paper and attacked them furiously, with scowling eyes. After a really dreadful interim of silence, the mysterious little visitor rose in a gloomy, discouraged kind of way, and climbing up again on the narrow brass fender, peered once more into the face of the clock. It's twenty minutes of eight now, she announced, into her voice crept for the first time the faintest suggestion of a tremor. It's twenty minutes of eight now, and I've got to live here exactly at eight. Twenty minutes is a rather, a rather stingy little bit out of a whole lifetime, she added falteringly. Then and then only did Stanton's nervousness break forth suddenly into one wild, uproarious laugh that seemed to light up the whole dark ominous room as though the gray, sulky, smoldering hearthfire itself had exploded into iridescent flame. Chasing close behind the musical contagion of his deep guffaws followed the softer, gentler giggle of the dainty pink veiled lady. By the time they had both finished laughing, it was fully quarter of eight. But you see it was just this way, explained the pleasant little voice all alto notes again. Cautiously a slim unringed hand burrowed out from the somber folds of the big cloak and raised the pink mouth mumbling veil as much as half an inch above the red-lipped speech line. You see it was just this way. You paid me a lot of money, all in advance, for a six-week special edition deluxe love letter cereal, and I spent your money the day I got it, and worse than that I owed it, long before I even got it, and worst of all I've got a chance now to go home tomorrow for all the rest of the winter. No, I don't mean that exactly, I mean I've found a chance to go up to Vermont and have all my expenses paid just for reading aloud every day to a lady who isn't so awfully deaf. But you see I still owe you a week's subscription, and I can't refund you the money because I haven't got it, and it happens that I can't run a fancy love letter business from the special house that I'm going to. There aren't enough resources there and all that, so I thought that perhaps, perhaps considering how much you've been teasing and teasing to know who I was, I thought that perhaps if I came here this evening and let you really see me, that maybe, you know, maybe not positively but just maybe you'd be willing to call that equivalent to one week's subscription, would you? In the sharp eagerness of her question she turned her shrouded face full view to stent and scurious gaze, and he saw the little nervous mischievous twitch of her lips at the edge of her masking pink veil resolve itself suddenly into a whimper of real pain. Yet so vivid were the lips so blissfully, youthfully, lusciously carmine that every single individual statement she made seemed only like a festive little announcement printed in red ink. I guess I'm not a very good business manager, faltered the red-lipped voice within conqueror's pathos. Indeed, I know I'm not because, well, because the serial letter company has gone broke. Bancrupt is it that you really say? With a little mockingly playful imitation of a stride she walked the first two fingers of her right hand across the surface of the table to Stanton's discarded supper dishes. Oh, please, may I have that piece of cold toast? She asked plaintively. No professional actress on the stage could have spoken the words more deliciously. Even to the actual crunching of the toast in her little shining white teeth, she sought to illustrate as fantastically as possible the ultimate misery of a bankrupt person starving for cold toast. Stanton's spontaneous laughter tested his full appreciation of her mimicry. But I tell you, the serial letter company has gone broke. She persisted a trifle wistfully, I guess. I guess it takes a man to really run a business with any sort of financial success, because you see a man never puts anything except his head into his business. And of course, if you only put your head into it, then you go right along, giving always just a little wee bit less than value received, and so you can't helps, sir, making a profit. Why, people would think you were plain star craze if you gave them even one more pair of poor rubber boots than they paid for. But a woman? Well, you see, my little business was a sort of a scheme to sell sympathy, perfectly good sympathy, you know, but to sell it to people who really needed it instead of giving it away to people who didn't care anything about it at all. And you have to run that sort of business almost entirely with your heart, and you wouldn't feel decent at all unless you delivered everybody just a little tiny bit more sympathy than he paid for. Otherwise, you see, you wouldn't be delivering perfectly good sympathy. So that's why you understand now that's why I had to send you my very own woolly blanket wrapper, and my very own silver poringer, and my very own slingshot that I fight city cats with, because you see, I had to use every single cent of your money right away to pay for the things that I'd already bought for other people. For other people? Guised Stanton a bit resentfully. Oh, yes, acknowledged the girl for several other people. Then, did you like the idea of the rheumatic night's entertainment? She asked, quite abruptly. Did I like it? cried Stanton. Did I like it? With a little shrugging air of apology, the girl straightened up very stiffly in her chair. Of course it wasn't exactly an original idea, she explained contritely. That is, I mean, not original for you. You see, it's really a little club of mine, a little subscription club of rheumatic people who can't sleep, and I go every night in the week, an hour to each one of them. There are only three, you know. There is a youngish lady in Boston and a very, very old man out in Brookline, and the tiniest sort of a poor little sick girl in Cambridge. Sometimes I turn up just at supper time and jolly them along a bit with their grueles. Sometimes I don't get around till ten or eleven o'clock in the great boo black dark. From two to three in the morning seems to be the cruelest, grayest, coldest time for the little girl in Cambridge, and I play the banjo decently, well, you know, and sing, more or less, and tell stories or read aloud, and I most always go dressed up in some sort of a fancy costume, because I can't seem to find any other thing to do that astonishes sick people so much and makes them sit up so bravely and look so shiny. And really, it isn't such a dreadfully hard work to do, because everything fits together so well. The short skirts, for instance, that turn me into such a jolly, prattling, great-grandchild for the poor old gentleman, make me just a perfectly rational, contemporaneous-looking playmate for the small Cambridge girl. I am so very, very little. Only, of course, she finished wryly. Only, of course, it costs such a horrid big lot for costumes and carriages and things. That's what's busted me, as the boys say. And then, of course, I'm most dreadfully sleepy all the day-times when I ought to be writing nice things for my serial-letter company business. And then one day last week. The vivid red lips twisted all at one corner. One night, last week, they sent me a word from Cambridge that the little little girl was going to die and was calling and calling for the gray plush squirrel lady. So I hired a big gray squirrel coat from a furrier whom I know, and I ripped up my muff and made me the very best sort of a hot gray smothery face that I could. And I went out to Cambridge and sat three hours on the footboard of a bed, cracking jokes and nuts to beguile a little child's death pain. And somehow it broke my heart or my spirit or something. Somehow I think I could have stood it better with my own skin face. Anyway, the little girl doesn't need me anymore. Anyway, it doesn't matter if someone did need me. I tell you, I'm broke. I tell you, I haven't got one single solitary more thing to give. It isn't just my pocket book that's empty, it's my head that's bent, too. It's my heart that's altogether stripped. And I'm going to run away. Yes, I am. Jumping to her feet, she stood there for an instant, all out of breath as though just the mere fancy thought of running away had almost exhausted her. Then suddenly she began to laugh. I am so tired of making up things, she confessed. Why, I'm so tired of making up grandfathers. I am so tired of making up pirates. I am so tired of making up lovers that I actually cherish the Bill Collector as the only real genuine acquaintance who might have in Boston. Certainly there's no slightest trace of pretense about him. Excuse me for being so flippant, she added sofully, but you see I haven't got any sympathy left even for myself. But for heaven's sake, cried Stanton, why don't you let somebody help you? Why don't you let me? Oh, you can help me, cried a little red-lipped voice excitedly. Oh yes, indeed you can help me. That's why I came here this evening. You see, I've settled up now with every one of my creditors except you and the youngish Boston lady, and I'm on my way to her house now. We are reading Oriental Fairy stories together. Truly I think she'll be very glad indeed to release me from my contract when I offer her my coral beads instead, because they are dreadfully nice beads. My real unpretended grandfather carved them for me himself. But how can I settle with you? I haven't got anything left to settle with, and it might be months and months before I could refund the actual cash money. So wouldn't you possibly call my coming here this evening an equivalent to one-week subscription? Wriggling out of the cloak and veil that wrapped her like a chrysalis, she emerged suddenly, a glimmering, shimmering little Oriental figure of satin and silver and haunting sandalwood, a veritable little incandescent rainbow of spangled moonlight and flaming scarlet in dark purple shadows. Great heavy jet black curls caught back from her small pecan face by a blazing rhinestone fillet, cheeks just a tiny bit over-tinted with rouge and excitement, big red-brown eyes packed full of highlights like a startled fawns, bold in the utter security for masquerade, yet scared almost to death by the persistent underlying heart-thump of her unescapable self-consciousness. Altogether as tantalizing, altogether as unreal as a vision out of the Arabian Nights, she stood there staring quizzically at Stanton. Would you call it an equivalent? Would you? She asked nervously. Then, pirouetting over to the largest mirror in such a band, smooth and twist, her silken sash into place, somewhere at wrist or ankle, twittered the jangle of innumerable bangles. Oh, don't, don't I look gorgeous? She stammered. Oh, end of ch-