Rose MacLeod. Alice Brown

first notices came, I used to lie awake from three o'clock on, to laugh. I used to go to the window when Electra was in the room, and make up faces, to let off steam and keep her from knowing. Then the letters kept coming, and clubs and things kept hounding me, and Electra was always at me. There she is now, with my grog. See me take it and pour it into the syringa."

II

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      Electra was crossing the veranda with her springing step, bearing a glass of beaten egg and milk on a little tray. Madam Fulton signed to her to place the tray on a table, evidently ready for such ministrations, and then presented her friend. Electra greeted him with a smile of bright acceptance. She knew his standing, and his air of worldly ease quite satisfied her.

      "May I bring you—?" she began, with a pretty grace.

      "I should like a glass of water," said Billy, "if you will be so good."

      When she had gone, Madam Fulton spoke in impressive haste:—

      "How long can you stay, Billy? All day? All night?"

      "I've got to run back to New York for a bit, but I shall be in America all summer, one place or another. I'll stay to luncheon, if you'll let me."

      "We must avoid Electra! If she comes back and settles on us, I shall simply take you to walk. We can go over to Bessie Grant's. You remember her. She married the doctor."

      "I remember."

      Electra had returned with a glass and pitcher, and ice clinking pleasantly. She took occasion to explain to Madam Fulton, with some civil hesitation,—

      "I have a committee meeting, grandmother. I had planned to go in town."

      The old lady responded briskly.

      "Go, my dear, go. Mr. Stark will stay to luncheon. We'll look out for each other."

      When Electra had rustled away, after the pleasantest of farewell recognitions between her and the guest, Madam Fulton heaved a sigh.

      "Billy," said she, "that's a dreadful girl."

      "She's a very handsome girl. What's the matter with her?"

      "She's so equipped. First, she's well born. Her grandmother was a Grace and her mother was a Vanderdecken. See her teeth. See her hair, and her profile. Dreadful!"

      "They're very beautiful, in a correct way. She's as well made as a grand piano."

      "That's it, Billy. And she has done nothing but polish herself, and now you can see your face in her. Fancy, Billy, what these modern creatures do. They go to gymnasium. They can take a five-barred gate, I believe, in their knickerbockers and what they call sneakers. They understand all about foods and what's good for them and what's good for the aged, and if you're over seventy they buy condensed foods in cans and make you take it twice a day."

      "You haven't tasted your grog."

      "I shan't. Want it?"

      He accepted the glass, and sniffed at it critically.

      "That's good," he commented. "That's very good. There's a familiar creature in that." He tasted, and then drank with gusto.

      "Well," said the old lady disparagingly, "you wouldn't have said so if it had been one of the foods. I have them before I go to bed."

      He spoke persuasively: "Florrie, let's talk a little more about the book."

      "There's nothing more to say. I've told you the whole story, and I know you won't tell anybody else."

      "Don't you think you'd better make a clean breast of it to Gilbert and Wall?"

      "What for?"

      "Well, I don't know exactly: only it seems to me publishers and authors are in a more or less confidential relation. Being a publisher myself, I naturally feel rather strongly about it."

      "I don't see it in the least," said the old lady decisively. "All this talk about the paternal relation is mere poppycock. They print me a book. If it takes a start, they back it. They're as glad as I am. But as to telling them my glorious little joke, why, I can't and I won't."

      "But, dear woman, they're printing away with full confidence in having got a valuable book out of you."

      "So they have. It's selling, isn't it?"

      "Madly. Specialists want it for honest data. The general reader has got an idea from the reviews that there's personal gossip in it, more or less racy. So it goes."

      "Well, let it go," said the old lady recklessly. "I shan't stop it."

      "No, but I can't help thinking Gilbert and Wall ought to be in the secret."

      "Do you imagine they'd stop printing?"

      "I don't imagine anything. I believe, to speak temperately, they'd drop dead. I only say it's a fearful and wonderful situation, and they ought to know it. You see, dear woman, you've not only played a joke on the public; you've played a joke on them."

      "Well, for goodness' sake, why not? What's a publisher, anyway? Has he got to be treated like a Hindu god? Billy Stark, I wish you'd stayed in London where you belong."

      Again Billy felt himself wheezing, and gave up to it as before. She watched him unwinkingly, and by and by she chuckled a little and then joined him, in an ecstasy.

      "Florrie," said he, "you're simply a glorious portent, and you've no more moral sense than the cat."

      "No, Billy, no!" She was answering in a happy acquiescence. "I never had any. I've always wanted some fun, and I want it to this day." Her old face changed surprisingly under a shade of gravity. "And see where it's led me." It was natural to conclude that her verdict embraced wider evidence than that of the erring book. Billy, quite serious in his turn, looked at her in candid invitation. She answered him earnestly and humbly: "Billy, I always took the wrong road. I took it in the beginning and I never got out of it."

      "There's a frightful number of wrong turnings," Billy offered, in rather inadequate sympathy, "and a great deficiency of guideposts."

      "You see, Billy, the first thing I did was to give up Charlie Grant and marry Mark Fulton. I was only a country girl. Charlie was a country boy. I thought Mark must be a remarkable person because he was a professor in Cambridge. I thought Charlie was going to be a poor little country doctor, because he was studying medicine with another country doctor, and he couldn't go to college to save his skin. There were eight children, you know, younger than he. He had to work on the farm. Well, Billy, I made a mistake."

      Stark marveled at the crude simplicity of all this. He forgot, for the moment, that she was an old woman, and that for a long time she had been conning over the past like a secret record, full of blemishes, perhaps, but not now to be remedied.

      "You did like Charlie," he ventured. "I knew that."

      "I liked him very much. And I've never quite escaped from his line of life, if that's what they call it. Since Electra was alone and I came here to stay with her, I've been thrown with his widow. Bessie's an old woman, too, you know, like me. But she's a different kind."

      "She was a pretty girl. Rather sedate, I remember, for a girl."

      "Billy, she's a miracle. She lives alone, all but old Mary to do the work. She's stiffened from rheumatism so that she sits in her chair nearly all day, and stumps round a little, in agony, with two canes. But she's had her life."

      "How has she had it, Florrie? In having Grant?"

      "Because all her choices were good choices. She took him when he was poor, and she helped him work. They had one son. He married a singer, a woman—well, like me. Maybe it was in the blood to want a woman like me. Then this boy and the singer had two sons—one of them clever. Peter Grant, you know. I suppose he's a genius, if there are such.