We have been requested to write, during this vacation, a true and veracious account of a meeting with any celebrity we happened to meet during the summer. If no celebrity, any interesting character would do, excepting one's own family.

But as one's own family is neither celebrated nor interesting, there is no temptation to write about it.

As I met Mr. Reginald Beecher this summer, I have chosen him as my subject.

Brief history of the Subject: He was born in 1890 at Woodbury, N. J. Attended public high schools, and in 1910 graduated from Princeton University.

Following year produced first Play in New York, called Her Soul. Followed this by the Soul Mate, and this by The Divorce.

Description of Subject. Mr. Beecher is tall and slender, and wears a very small dark Mustache. Although but twenty-six years of age, his hair on close inspection reveals here and there a silver thread. His teeth are good, and his eyes amber, with small flecks of brown in them. He has been vaccinated twice.

It has always been one of my chief ambitions to meet a celebrity. On one or two occasions we have had them at school, but they never sit at the Junior's table. Also, they are seldom connected with either the Drama or The Movies (a slang term but apparently taking a place in our literature).

It was my intention, on being given this subject for my midsummer theme, to seek out Mrs. Bainbridge, a lady author who has a cottage across the bay from ours, and to ask the privilege of sitting at her feet for a few hours, basking in the sunshine of her presence, and learning from her own lips her favorite Flower, her favorite Poem and the favorite child of her brain.

Of all those arts in which the wise excel,

Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Duke of Buckingham

I had meant to write my theme on her, but I learned in time that she was forty years of age. Her work is therefore done. She has passed her active years, and I consider that it is not the past of American Letters which is at stake, but the future. Besides, I was more interested in the drama than in literature.

Possibly it is owing to the fact that the girls think I resemble Julia Marlowe, that from my earliest years my mind has been turned toward the stage. I am very determined and fixed in my ways, and with me to decide to do a thing is to decide to do it. I am not of a romantic nature, however, and as I learned of the dangers of the theater, I drew back. Even a strong nature, such as mine is, on occasions, can be influenced. I therefore decided to change my plans, and to write plays instead of acting in them.

At first I meant to write comedies, but as I realized the gravity of life, and its bitterness and disappointments, I turned naturally to tragedy. Surely, as dear Shakespeare says:

The world is a stage

Where every man must play a part,

And mine a sad one.

This explains my sincere interest in Mr. Beecher. His works were all realistic and sad. I remember that I saw the first one three years ago, when a mere child, and became violently ill from crying and had to be taken home.

The school will recall that last year I wrote a play, patterned on The Divorce, and that only a certain narrowness of view on the part of the faculty prevented it being the class play. If I may be permitted to express an opinion, we of the class of 1917 are not children, and should not be treated as such.

Encouraged by the applause of my class-mates, and feeling that I was of a more serious turn of mind than most of them, who seem to think of pleasure only, I decided to write a play during the summer. I would thus be improving my vacation hours, and, I considered, keeping out of mischief. It was pure idleness which had caused my trouble during the last Christmas holidays. How true it is that the devil finds work for idle hands!

With a play and this theme I believed that the devil would give me up as a total loss, and go elsewhere.

How little we can read the future!

I now proceed to an account of my meeting and acquaintance with Mr. Beecher. It is my intention to conceal nothing. I can only comfort myself with the thought that my motives were innocent, and that I was obeying orders and securing material for a theme. I consider that the attitude of my family is wrong and cruel, and that my sister Leila, being only 20 months older, although out in society, has no need to write me the sort of letters she has been writing. Twenty months is twenty months, and not two years, although she seems to think it is.

I returned home full of happy plans for my vacation. When I look back it seems strange that the gay and innocent young girl of the train can have been! So much that is tragic has since happened. If I had not had a cinder in my eye things would have been different. But why repine? Fate frequently hangs thus on a single hair—an eye-lash, as one may say.

Father met me at the train. I had got the aforementioned cinder in my eye, and a very nice young man had taken it out for me. I still cannot see what harm there was in our chatting together after that, especially as we said nothing to object to. But father looked very disagreeable about it, and the young man went away in a hurry. But it started us off wrong, although I got him—father—to promise not to tell mother.

"I do wish you would be more careful, Bab," he said with a sort of sigh.

"Careful!" I said. "Then it's not doing things, but being found out, that matters!"

"Careful in your conduct, Bab."

"He was a beautiful young man, father," I observed, slipping my arm through his.

"Barbara, Barbara! Your poor mother——"

"Now look here, father" I said. "If it was mother who was interested in him it might be troublesome. But it is only me. And I warn you, here and now, that I expect to be thrilled at the sight of a nice young man right along. It goes up my back and out the roots of my hair."

Well, my father is a real person, so he told me to talk sense, and gave me twenty dollars, and agreed to say nothing about the young man to mother, if I would root for Canada against the Adirondacks for the summer, because of the fishing.

Mother was waiting in the hall for me, but she held me off with both hands.

"Not until you have bathed and changed your clothing, Barbara," she said. "I have never had it."

She meant the whooping cough. The school will recall the epidemic which ravaged us last June, and changed us from a peaceful institution to what sounded like a dog show.

Well, I got the same old room, not much fixed up, but they had put up different curtains anyhow, thank goodness. I had been hinting all spring for new furniture, but my family does not take a hint unless it is chloroformed first, and I found the same old stuff there.

They believe in waiting until a girl makes her debut before giving her anything but the necessities of life.

Sis was off for a week-end, but Hannah was there, and I kissed her. Not that I'm so fond of her, but I had to kiss somebody.

"Well, Miss Barbara!" she said. "How you've grown!"

That made me rather sore, because I am not a child any longer, but they all talk to me as if I were but six years old, and small for my age.

"I've stopped growing, Hannah," I said, with dignity. "At least, almost. But I see I still draw the nursery."

Hannah was opening my suitcase, and she looked up and said: "I tried to get you the blue room, Miss Bab. But Miss Leila said she needed it for house parties."

"Never mind," I said. "I don't care anything about furniture. I have other things to think about, Hannah; I want the school room desk up here."

"Desk!" she said, with her jaw drooping.

"I am writing now," I said. "I need a lot of ink, and paper, and a good lamp. Let them keep the blue room, Hannah, for their selfish purposes. I shall be happy in my work. I need nothing more."

"Writing!" said Hannah. "Is it a book you're writing?"

"A play."

"Listen to the child! A play!"

I sat on the edge of the bed.

"Listen, Hannah," I said. "It is not what is outside of us that matters. It is what is inside. It is what we are, not what we eat, or look like, or wear. I have given up everything, Hannah, to my career."

"You're young yet," said Hannah. "You used to be fond enough of the boys."

Hannah has been with us for years, so she gets rather talky at times, and has to be sat upon.

"I care nothing whatever for the Other Sex," I replied haughtily.

She was opening my suitcase at the time, and I was surveying the chamber which was to be the seen of my Literary Life, at least for some time.

"Now and then," I said to Hannah, "I shall read you parts of it. Only you mustn't run and tell mother."

"Why not?" said she, peering into the Suitcase.

"Because I intend to deal with Life," I said. "I shall deal with real Things, and not the way we think them. I am young, but I have thought a great deal. I shall mince nothing."

"Look here, Miss Barbara," Hannah said, all at once, "what are you doing with this whiskey flask? And these socks? And—you come right here, and tell me where you got the things in this suitcase." I stocked over to the bed, and my blood froze in my veins. IT WAS NOT MINE.

Words cannot fully express how I felt. While fully convinced that there had been a mistake, I knew not when or how. Hannah was staring at me with cold and accusing eyes.

"You're a very young lady, Miss Barbara," she said, with her eyes full of Suspicion, "to be carrying a flask about with you." I was as puzzled as she was, but I remained calm and to all appearances Spartan.

"I am young in years," I remarked. "But I have seen Life, Hannah."

Now I meant nothing by this at the time. But it was getting on my nerves to be put in the infant class all the time. The Christmas before they had done it, and I had had my revenge. Although it had hurt me more than it hurt them, and if I gave them a fright I gave myself a worse one. As I said at that time:

Oh, what a tangled web we weave,

When first we practice to deceive.

Sir Walter Scott.

Hannah gave me a horrified glare, and dipped into the suitcase again. She brought up a tin box of cigarettes, and I thought she was going to have delirium tremens at once.

Well, at first I thought the girls at school had played a trick on me, and a low down mean trick at that. There are always those who think it is funny to do that sort of thing, but they are the first to squeal when anything is done to them. Once I put a small garter snake in a girl's muff, and it went up her sleeve, which is nothing to some of the things she had done to me. And you would have thought the school was on fire.

Anyhow, I said to myself that some Smarty was trying to get me into trouble, and Hannah would run to the family, and they'd never believe me. All at once I saw all my cherished plans for the summer gone, and me in the country somewhere with Mademoiselle, and walking through the pasture with a botany in one hand and a folding cup in the other, in case we found a spring a cow had not stepped in. Mademoiselle was once my Governess, but has retired to private life, except in cases of emergency.

I am naturally very quick in mind. The Archibalds are all like that, and when once we decide on a course we stick to it through thick and thin. But we do not lie. It is ridiculous for Hannah to say I said the cigarettes were mine. All I said was:

"I suppose you are going to tell the family. You'd better run, or you'll burst."

"Oh, Miss Barbara, Miss Barbara!" she said. "And you so young to be so wild!"

This was unjust, and I am one to resent injustice. I had returned home with my mind fixed on serious things, and now I was being told I was wild.

"If I tell your mother she'll have a fit," Hannah said, evidently drawn hither and thither by emotion. "Now see here, Miss Bab, you've just come home, and there was trouble at your last vacation that I'm like to remember to my dying day. You tell me how those things got there, like a good girl, and I'll say nothing about them."

I am naturally sweet in disposition, but to call me a good girl and remind me of last Christmas holidays was too much. My natural firmness came to the front.

"Certainly NOT," I said.

"You needn't stick your lip out at me, Miss Bab, that was only giving you a chance, and forgetting my duty to help you, not to mention probably losing my place when the family finds out."

"Finds out what?"

"What you've been up to, the stage, and writing plays, and now liquor and tobacco!"

Now I may be at fault in the narrative that follows. But I ask the school if this was fair treatment. I had returned to my home full of high ideals, only to see them crushed beneath the heal of domestic tyranny.

Necessity is the argument of tyrants;

it is the creed of slaves.

William Pitt.

How true are these immortal words.

It was with a firm countenance but a sinking heart that I saw Hannah leave the room. I had come home inspired with lofty ambition, and it had ended thus. Heart-broken, I wandered to the bedside, and let my eyes fall on the suitcase, the container of all my woe.

Well, I was surprised, all right. It was not and never had been mine. Instead of my blue serge sailor suit and my 'robe de nuit' and kimono etc., it contained a checked gentleman's suit, a mussed shirt and a cap. At first I was merely astonished. Then a sense of loss overpowered me. I suffered. I was prostrated with grief. Not that I cared a rap for the clothes I'd lost, being most of them to small and patched here and there. But I had lost the plot of my play. My career was gone.

I was undone.

It may be asked what has this recital to do with the account of meeting a celebrity. I reply that it has a great deal to do with it. A bare recital of a meeting may be news, but it is not art.

A theme consists of Introduction, Body and Conclusion.

This is still the Introduction.

When I was at last revived enough to think I knew what had happened. The young man who took the cinder out of my eye had come to sit beside me, which I consider was merely kindness on his part and nothing like flirting, and he had brought his suitcase over, and they had got mixed up. But I knew the family would call it flirting, and not listen to a word I said.

A madness seized me. Now that everything is over, I realize that it was madness. But "there is a divinity that shapes our ends etc." It was to be. It was Karma, or Kismet, or whatever the word is. It was written in the Book of Fate that I was to go ahead, and wreck my life, and generally ruin everything.

I locked the door behind Hannah, and stood with tragic feet, "where the brook and river meet." What was I to do? How hide this evidence of my (presumed) duplicity? I was innocent, but I looked guilty. This, as everyone knows, is worse than guilt.

I unpacked the suitcase as fast as I could, therefore, and being just about distracted, I bundled the things up and put them all together in the toy closet, where all Sis's dolls and mine are, mine being mostly pretty badly gone, as I was always hard on dolls.

How far removed were those innocent years when I played with dolls!

Well, I knew Hannah pretty well, and therefore was not surprised when, having hidden the trousers under a doll buggy, I heard mother's voice at the door.

"Let me in, Barbara," she said.

I closed the closet door, and said: "What is it, mother?"

"Let me in."

So I let her in, and pretended I expected her to kiss me, which she had not yet, on account of the whooping cough. But she seemed to have forgotten that. Also the kiss.

"Barbara," she said, in the meanest voice, "how long have you been smoking?"

Now I must pause to explain this. Had mother approached me in a sweet and maternal manner, I would have been softened, and would have told the whole story. But she did not. She was, as you might say, steaming with rage. And seeing that I was misunderstood, I hardened. I can be as hard as adamant when necessary.

"What do you mean, mother?"

"Don't answer one question with another."

"How can I answer when I don't understand you?"

She simply twitched with fury.

"You—a mere Child!" she raved. "And I can hardly bring myself to mention it—the idea of your owning a flask, and bringing it into this house—it is—it is——"

Well, I was growing cold and more haughty every moment, so I said: "I don't see why the mere mention of a flask upsets you so. It isn't because you aren't used to one, especially when traveling. And since I was a mere baby I have been accustomed to intoxicants."

"Barbara!" she interjected, in the most dreadful tone.

"I mean, in the family," I said. "I have seen wine on our table ever since I can remember. I knew to put salt on a claret stain before I could talk."

Well, you know how it is to see an enemy on the run, and although I regret to refer to my dear mother as an enemy, still at that moment she was such and no less. And she was beating it. It was the reference to my youth that had aroused me, and I was like a wounded lion. Besides, I knew well enough that if they refused to see that I was practically grown up, if not entirely, I would get a lot of Sis's clothes, fixed up with new ribbons. Faded old things! I'd had them for years.

Better to be considered a bad woman than an unformed child.

"However, mother," I finished, "if it is any comfort to you, I did not buy that flask. And I am not a confirmed alcoholic. By no means."

"This settles it," she said, in a melancholy tone. "When I think of the comfort Leila has been to me, and the anxiety you have caused, I wonder where you get your—your DEVILTRY from. I am positively faint."

I was alarmed, for she did look queer, with her face all white around the rouge. So I reached for the flask.

"I'll give you a swig of this," I said. "It will pull you around in no time."

But she held me off fiercely.

"Never!" she said. "Never again. I shall empty the wine cellar. There will be nothing to drink in this house from now on. I do not know what we are coming to."

She walked into the bathroom, and I heard her emptying the flask down the drain pipe. It was a very handsome flask, silver with gold stripes, and all at once I knew the young man would want it back. So I said:

"Mother, please leave the flask here anyhow."

"Certainly not."

"It's not mine, mother."

"Whose is it?"

"It—a friend of mine loaned it to me."

"Who?"

"I can't tell you."

"You can't TELL me! Barbara, I am utterly bewildered. I sent you away a simple child, and you return to me—what?"

Well, we had about an hour's fight over it, and we ended in a compromise. I gave up the flask, and promised not to smoke and so forth, and I was to have some new dresses and a silk sweater, and to be allowed to stay up until ten o'clock, and to have a desk in my room for my work.

"Work!" mother said. "Career! What next? Why can't you be like Leila, and settle down to having a good time?"

"Leila and I are different," I said loftily, for I resented her tone. "Leila is a child of the moment. Life for her is one grand, sweet Song. For me it is a serious matter. 'Life is real, life is earnest, and the grave is not its goal,'" I quoted in impassioned tones.

(Because that is the way I feel. How can the grave be its goal? THERE MUST BE SOMETHING BEYOND. I have thought it all out, and I believe in a world beyond, but not in a hell. Hell, I believe, is the state of mind one gets into in this world as a result of one's wicked acts or one's wicked thoughts, and is in one's self.)

As I have said, the other side of the compromise was that I was not to carry flasks with me, or drink any punch at parties if it had a stick in it, and you can generally find out by the taste. For if it is what Carter Brooks calls "loaded" it stings your tongue. Or if it tastes like cider it's probably champagne. And I was not to smoke any cigarettes.

Mother was holding out on the sweater at that time, saying that Sis had a perfectly good one from Miami, and why not wear that? So I put up a strong protest about the cigarettes, although I have never smoked but once as I think the school knows, and that only half through, owing to getting dizzy. I said that Sis smoked now and then, because she thought it looked smart; but that, if I was to have a career, I felt that the soothing influence of tobacco would help a lot.

So I got the new sweater, and everything looked smooth again, and mother kissed me on the way out, and said she had not meant to be harsh, but that my great uncle Putnam had been a notorious drunkard, and I looked like him, although of a more refined type.

There was a dreadful row that night, however, when father came home. We were all dressed for dinner, and waiting in the drawing room, and Leila was complaining about me, as usual.

"She looks older than I do now, mother," she said. "If she goes to the seashore with us I'll have her always tagging at my heals. I don't see why I can't have my first summer in peace." Oh, yes, we were going to the shore, after all. Sis wanted it, and everybody does what she wants, regardless of what they prefer, even fishing.

"First summer!" I exclaimed. "One would think you were a teething baby!"

"I was speaking to mother, Barbara. Everyone knows that a debutante only has one year nowadays, and if she doesn't go off in that year she's swept away by the flood of new girls the next fall. We might as well be frank. And while Barbara's not a beauty, as soon as the bones in her neck get a little flesh on them she won't be hopeless, and she has a flippant manner that men like."

"I intend to keep Barbara under my eyes this summer," mother said firmly. "After last Christmas's happenings, and our discovery today, I shall keep her with me. She need not, however, interfere with you, Leila. Her hours are mostly different, and I will see that her friends are the younger boys."

I said nothing, but I knew perfectly well she had in mind Eddie Perkins and Willie Graham, and a lot of other little kids that hang around the fruit punch at parties, and throw the peas from the croquettes at each other when the footmen are not near, and pretend they are allowed to smoke, but have sworn off for the summer.

I was naturally indignant at Sis's words, which were not filial, to my mind, but I replied as sweetly as possible:

"I shall not be in your way, Leila. I ask nothing but food and shelter, and that perhaps not for long."

"Why? Do you intend to die?" she demanded.

"I intend to work," I said. "It's more interesting than dieing, and will be a novelty in this house."

Father came in just then, and he said:

"I'll not wait to dress, Clara. Hello, children. I'll just change my collar while you ring for the cocktails."

Mother got up and faced him with majesty.

"We are not going to have, any" she said.

"Any what?" said father from the doorway.

"I have had some fruit juice prepared with a dash of bitters. It is quite nice. And I'll ask you, James, not to explode before the servants. I will explain later."

Father has a very nice disposition but I could see that mother's manner got on his nerves, as it got on mine. Anyhow there was a terrific fuss, with Sis playing the piano so that the servants would not hear, and in the end father had a cocktail. Mother waited until he had had it, and was quieter, and then she told him about me, and my having a flask in my suitcase. Of course I could have explained, but if they persisted in misunderstanding me, why not let them do so, and be miserable?

"It's a very strange thing, Bab," he said, looking at me, "that everything in this house is quiet until you come home, and then we get as lively as kittens in a frying pan. We'll have to marry you off pretty soon, to save our piece of mind."

"James!" said my mother. "Remember last winter, please."

There was no claret or anything with dinner, and father ordered mineral water, and criticized the food, and fussed about Sis's dressmaker's bill. And the second man gave notice immediately after we left the dining room. When mother reported that, as we were having coffee in the drawing room, father said:

"Humph! Well, what can you expect? Those fellows have been getting the best half of a bottle of claret every night since they've been here, and now it's cut off. Damned if I wouldn't like to leave myself."

From that time on I knew that I was watched. It made little or no difference to me. I had my work, and it filled my life. There were times when my soul was so filled with joy that I could hardly bare it. I had one act done in two days. I wrote out the love scenes in full, because I wanted to be sure of what they would say to each other. How I thrilled as each marvelous burst of fantasy flowed from my pen! But the dialogue of less interesting parts I left for the actors to fill in themselves. I consider this the best way, as it gives them a chance to be original, and not to have to say the same thing over and over.

Jane Raleigh came over to see me the day after I came home, and I read her some of the love scenes. She positively wept with excitement.

"Bab," she said, "if any man, no matter who, ever said those things to me, I'd go straight into his arms. I couldn't help it. Whose going to act in it?"

"I think I'll have Robert Edeson, or Richard Mansfield."

"Mansfield's dead," said Jane.

"Honestly?"

"Honest he is. Why don't you get some of these moving picture actors? They never have a chance in the Movies, only acting and not talking."

Well, that sounded logical. And then I read her the place where the cruel first husband comes back and finds her married again and happy, and takes the children out to drown them, only he can't because they can swim, and they pull him in instead. The curtain goes down on nothing but a few bubbles rising to mark his watery grave.

Jane was crying.

"It is too touching for words, Bab!" she said. "It has broken my heart. I can just close my eyes and see the theater dark, and the stage almost dark, and just those bubbles coming up and breaking. Would you have to have a tank?"

"I daresay," I replied dreamily. "Let the other people worry about that. I can only give them the material, and hope that they have intelligence enough to grasp it."

I think Sis must have told Carter Brooks something about the trouble I was in, for he brought me a box of candy one afternoon, and winked at me when mother was not looking.

"Don't open it here," he whispered.

So I was forced to control my impatience, though passionately fond of candy. And when I got to my room later, the box was full of cigarettes. I could have screamed. It just gave me one more thing to hide, as if a man's suit and shirt and so on was not sufficient.

But Carter paid more attention to me than he ever had before, and at a tea dance somebody had at the country club he took me to one side and gave me a good talking to.

"You're being rather a bad child, aren't you?" he said.

"Certainly not."

"Well, not bad, but—er—naughty. Now see here, Bab, I'm fond of you, and you're growing into a mighty pretty girl. But your whole social life is at stake. For heaven's sake, at least until you're married, cut out the cigarettes and booze."

That cut me to the heart, but what could I say?

Well, July came, and we had rented a house at Little Hampton and everywhere one went one fell over an open trunk or a barrel containing silver or linen.

Mother went around with her lips moving as if in prayer, but she was really repeating lists, such as sowing basket, table candles, headache tablets, black silk stockings and tennis rackets.

Sis got some lovely clothes, mostly imported, but they had a woman come in and sew for me. Hannah and she used to interrupt my most precious moments at my desk by running a tape measure around me, or pinning a paper pattern to me. The sewing woman always had her mouth full of pins, and once, owing to my remarking that I wished I had been illegitimate, so I could go away and live my own life, she swallowed one. It caused a grate deal of excitement, with Hannah blaming me and giving her vinegar to swallow to soften the pin. Well, it turned out all right, for she kept on living, but she pretended to have sharp pains all over her here and there, and if the pin had been as lively as a tadpole and wriggled from spot to spot, it could not have hurt in so many places.

Of course they blamed me, and I shut myself up more and more in my sanctuary. There I lived with the creatures of my dreams, and forgot for a while that I was only a Sub-Deb, and that Leila's last year's tennis clothes were being fixed over for me.

But how true what dear Shakespeare says:

dreams,

Which are the children of an idle brain.

Begot of nothing but vain fantasy.

I loved my dreams, but alas, they were not enough. After a tortured hour or two at my desk, living in myself the agonies of my characters, suffering the pangs of the wife with two husbands and both living, struggling in the water with the children, fruit of the first union, dying with number two and blowing my last bubbles heavenward—after all these emotions, I was done out.

Jane came in one day and found me prostrate on my couch, with a light of suffering in my eyes.

"Dearest!" cried Jane, and gliding to my side, fell on her knees.

"Jane!"

"What is it? You are ill?"

I could hardly more than whisper. In a low tone I said:

"He is dead."

"Dearest!"

"Drowned!"

At first she thought I meant a member of my family. But when she understood she looked serious.

"You are too intense, Bab," she said solemnly. "You suffer too much. You are wearing yourself out."

"There is no other way," I replied in broken tones.

Jane went to the Mirror and looked at herself. Then she turned to me.

"Others don't do it."

"I must work out my own Salvation, Jane," I observed firmly. But she had roused me from my apathy, and I went into Sis's room, returning with a box of candy some one had sent her. "I must feel, Jane, or I cannot write."

"Pooh! Loads of writers get fat on it. Why don't you try comedy? It pays well."

"Oh—MONEY!" I said, in a disgusted tone.

"Your FORTE, of course, is love," she said. "Probably that's because you've had so much experience." Owing to certain reasons it is generally supposed that I have experienced the gentle passion. But not so, alas! "Bab," Jane said, suddenly, "I have been your friend for a long time. I have never betrayed you. You can trust me with your life. Why don't you tell me?"

"Tell you what?"

"Something has happened. I see it in your eyes. No girl who is happy and has not a tragic story stays at home shut up at a messy desk when everyone is out at the club playing tennis. Don't talk to me about a career. A girl's career is a man and nothing else. And especially after last winter, Bab. Is—is it the same one?"

Here I made my fatal error. I should have said at once that there was no one, just as there had been no one last winter. But she looked so intense, sitting there, and after all, why should I not have an amorous experience? I am not ugly, and can dance well, although inclined to lead because of dancing with other girls all winter at school. So I lay back on my pillow and stared at the ceiling.

"No. It is not the same man."

"What is he like? Bab, I'm so excited I can't sit still."

"It—it hurts to talk about him," I observed faintly.

Now I intended to let it go at that, and should have, had not Jane kept on asking questions. Because I had had a good lesson the winter before, and did not intend to deceive again. And this I will say—I really told Jane Raleigh nothing. She jumped to her own conclusions. And as for her people saying she cannot chum with me any more, I will only say this: If Jane Raleigh smokes she did not learn it from me.

Well, I had gone as far as I meant to. I was not really in love with anyone, although I liked Carter Brooks, and would possibly have loved him with all the depth of my nature if Sis had not kept an eye on me most of the time. However——

Jane seemed to be expecting something, and I tried to think of some way to satisfy her and not make any trouble. And then I thought of the suitcase. So I locked the door and made her promise not to tell, and got the whole thing out of the toy closet.

"Wha—what is it?" asked Jane.

I said nothing, but opened it all up. The flask was gone, but the rest was there, and Carter's box too. Jane leaned down and lifted the trousers and poked around somewhat. Then she straitened and said:

"You have run away and got married, Bab."

"Jane!"

She looked at me piercingly.

"Don't lie to me," she said accusingly. "Or else what are you doing with a man's whole outfit, including his dirty collar? Bab, I just can't bare it."

Well, I saw that I had gone to far, and was about to tell Jane the truth when I heard the sewing woman in the hall. I had all I could do to get the things put away, and with Jane looking like death I had to stand there and be fitted for one of Sis's chiffon frocks, with the low neck filled in with net.

"You must remember, Miss Bab," said the human pin cushion, "that you are still a very young girl, and not out yet."

Jane got up off the bed suddenly.

"I—I guess I'll go, Bab," she said. "I don't feel very well."

As she went out she stopped in the doorway and crossed her heart, meaning that she would die before she would tell anything. But I was not comfortable. It is not a pleasant thought that your best friend considers you married and gone beyond recall, when in truth you are not, or even thinking about it, except in idle moments.

The seen now changes. Life is nothing but such changes. No sooner do we alight on one branch, and begin to sip the honey from it, but we are taken up and carried elsewhere, perhaps to the mountains or to the sea-shore, and there left to make new friends and find new methods of enjoyment.

The flight—or journey—was in itself an anxious time. For on my otherwise clear conscience rested the weight of that strange suitcase. Fortunately Hannah was so busy that I was left to pack my belongings myself, and thus for a time my guilty secret was safe. I put my things in on top of the masculine articles, not daring to leave any of them in the closet, owing to house-cleaning, which is always done before our return in the fall.

On the train I had a very unpleasant experience, due to Sis opening my suitcase to look for a magazine, and drawing out a soiled gentleman's collar. She gave me a very piercing glance, but said nothing and at the next opportunity I threw it out of a window, concealed in a newspaper.

We now approach the catastrophe. My book on play writing divides plays into Introduction, Development, Crisis, Denouement and Catastrophe. And so one may divide life. In my case the cinder proved the introduction, as there was none other. I consider that the suitcase was the development, my showing it to Jane Raleigh was the crisis, and the denouement or catastrophe occurred later on.

Let us then proceed to the catastrophe.

Jane Raleigh came to see me off at the train. Her family was coming the next day. And instead of flowers, she put a small bundle into my hands. "Keep it hidden, Bab," she said, "and tear up the card."

I looked when I got a chance, and she had crocheted me a wash cloth, with a pink edge. "For your linen chest," the card said, "and I'm doing a bath towel to match."

I tore up the card, but I put the wash cloth with the other things I was trying to hide, because it is bad luck to throw a gift away. But I hoped, as I seemed to be getting more things to conceal all the time, that she would make me a small bath towel, and not the sort as big as a bed spread.

Father went with us to get us settled, and we had a long talk while mother and Sis made out lists for dinners and so forth.

"Look here, Bab," he said, "something's wrong with you. I seem to have lost my only boy, and have got instead a sort of tear-y young person I don't recognize."

"I'm growing up, father" I said. I did not mean to rebuke him, but ye gods! Was I the only one to see that I was no longer a child?

"Sometimes I think you are not very happy with us."

"Happy?" I pondered. "Well, after all, what is happiness?"

He took a spell of coughing then, and when it was over he put his arms around me and was quite affectionate.

"What a queer little rat it is!" he said.

I only repeat this to show how even my father, with all his affection and good qualities, did not understand and never would understand. My heart was full of a longing to be understood. I wanted to tell him my yearnings for better things, my aspirations to make my life a great and glorious thing. AND HE DID NOT UNDERSTAND.

He gave me five dollars instead. Think of the tragedy of it!

As we went along, and he pulled my ear and finally went asleep with a hand on my shoulder, the bareness of my life came to me. I shook with sobs. And outside somewhere Sis and mother made dinner lists. Then and there I made up my mind to work hard and achieve, to become great and powerful, to write things that would ring the hearts of men—and women, to, of course—and to come back to them some day, famous and beautiful, and when they sued for my love, to be kind and haughty, but cold. I felt that I would always be cold, although gracious.

I decided then to be a writer of plays first, and then later on to act in them. I would thus be able to say what came into my head, as it was my own play. Also to arrange the scenes so as to wear a variety of gowns, including evening things. I spent the rest of the afternoon manicuring my nails in our state room.

Well, we got there at last. It was a large house, but everything was to thin about it. The school will understand this, the same being the condition of the new freshman dormitory. The walls were to thin, and so were the floors. The doors shivered in the wind, and palpitated if you slammed them. Also you could hear every sound everywhere.

I looked around me in despair. Where, oh where, was I to find my cherished solitude? Where?

On account of Hannah hating a new place, and considering the house an insult to the servants, especially only one bathroom for the lot of them, she let me unpack alone, and so far I was safe. But where was I to work? Fate settled that for me however.

There is no armor against fate;

Death lays his icy hand on Kings.

J. Shirley; Dirge.

Previously, however, mother and I had had a talk. She sailed into my room one evening, dressed for dinner, and found me in my ROBE DE NUIT, curled up in the window seat admiring the view of the ocean.

"Well!" she said. "Is this the way you intend going to dinner?"

"I do not care for any dinner," I replied. Then, seeing she did not understand, I said coldly. "How can I care for food, mother, when the sea looks like a dying opal?"

"Dying pussycat!" mother said, in a very nasty way. "I don't know what has come over you, Barbara. You used to be a normal child, and there was some accounting for what you were going to do. But now! Take off that nightgown, and I'll have Tanney hold off dinner for half an hour."

Tanney was the butler who had taken Patrick's place.

"If you insist," I said coldly. "But I shall not eat."

"Why not?"

"You wouldn't understand, mother."

"Oh, I wouldn't? Well, suppose I try," she said, and sat down. "I am not very intelligent, but if you put it clearly I may grasp it. Perhaps you'd better speak slowly, also."

So, sitting there in my room, while the sea throbbed in tireless beats against the shore, while the light faded and the stars issued, one by one, like a rash on the face of the sky, I told mother of my dreams. I intended, I said, to write life as it really is, and not as supposed to be.

"It may in places be, ugly" I said, "but truth is my banner. The truth is never ugly, because it is real. It is, for instance, not ugly if a man is in love with the wife of another, if it is real love, and not the passing fancy of a moment."

Mother opened her mouth, but did not say anything.

"There was a time," I said, "when I longed for things that now have no value whatever to me. I cared for clothes and even for the attentions of the other sex. But that has passed away, mother. I have now no thought but for my career."

I watched her face, and soon the dreadful understanding came to me. She, too, did not understand. My literary aspirations were as nothing to her!

Oh, the bitterness of that moment. My mother, who had cared for me as a child, and obeyed my slightest wish, no longer understood me. And saddest of all, there was no way out. None. Once, in my youth, I had believed that I was not the child of my parents at all, but an adopted one—perhaps of rank and kept out of my inheritance by those who had selfish motives. But now I knew that I had no rank or inheritance, save what I should carve out for myself. There was no way out. None.

Mother rose slowly, staring at me with perfectly fixed and glassy eyes.

"I am absolutely sure," she said, "that you are on the edge of something. It may be typhoid, or it may be an elopement. But one thing is certain. You are not normal."

With this she left me to my thoughts. But she did not neglect me. Sis came up after dinner, and I saw mother's fine hand in that. Although not hungry in the usual sense of the word, I had begun to grow rather empty, and was nibbling out of a box of chocolates when Sis came.

She got very little out of me. To one with softness and tenderness I would have told all, but Sis is not that sort. And at last she showed her claws.

"Don't fool yourself for a minute," she said. "This literary pose has not fooled anybody. Either you're doing it to appear interesting, or you've done something you're scared about. Which is it?"

I refused to reply.

"Because if it's the first, and you're trying to look literary, you are going about it wrong," she said. "Real Literary People don't go round mooning and talking about the opal sea."

I saw mother had been talking, and I drew myself up.

"They look and act like other people," said Leila, going to the bureau and spilling powder all over the place. "Look at Beecher."

"Beecher!" I cried, with a thrill that started inside my elbows. (I have read this to one or two of the girls, and they say there is no such thrill. But not all people act alike under the influence of emotion, and mine is in my arms, as stated.)

"The playwright," Sis said. "He's staying next door. And if he does any languishing it is not by himself."

There may be some who have for a long time had an ideal, but without hoping ever to meet him, and then suddenly learning that he is nearby, with indeed but a wall or two between, can be calm and cool. But I am not like that. Although long suppression has taught me to dissemble at times, where my heart is concerned I am powerless.

For it was at last my heart that was touched. I, who had scorned the other sex and felt that I was born cold and always would be cold, that day I discovered the truth. Reginald Beecher was my ideal. I had never spoken to him, nor indeed seen him, except for his pictures. But the very mention of his name brought a lump to my throat.

Feeling better immediately, I got Sis out of the room and coaxed Hannah to bring me some dinner. While she was sneaking it out of the pantry I was dressing, and soon, as a new being, I was out on the stone bench at the foot of the lawn, gazing with rapt eyes at the sea.

But fate was against me. Eddie Perkins saw me there and came over. He had but recently been put in long trousers, and those not his best ones but only white flannels. He was never sure of his garters, and was always looking to see if his socks were coming down. Well, he came over just as I was sure I saw Reginald Beecher next door on the veranda, and made himself a nuisance right away, trying all sorts of kid tricks, such as snapping a rubber band at me, and pulling out hairpins.

But I felt that I must talk to someone. So I said:

"Eddie, if you had your choice of love or a career, which would it be?"

"Why not both," he said, hitching the rubber band onto one of his front teeth and playing on it. "Neither ought to take up all a fellow's time. Say, listen to this! Talk about a ukelele!"

"A woman can never have both."

He played a while, strumming with one finger until the hand slipped off and stung him on the lip.

"Once," I said, "I dreamed of a career. But I believe love's the most important."

Well, I shall pass lightly over what followed. Why is it that a girl cannot speak of love without every member of the other sex present, no matter how young, thinking it is he? And as for mother maintaining that I kissed that wretched child, and they saw me from the drawing-room, it is not true and never was true. It was but one more misunderstanding which convinced the family that I was carrying on all manner of affairs.

Carter Brooks had arrived that day, and was staying at the Perkins' cottage. I got rid of the Perkins' baby, as his nose was bleeding—but I had not slapped him hard at all, and felt little or no compunction—when I heard Carter coming down the walk. He had called to see Leila, but she had gone to a beach dance and left him alone. He never paid any attention to me when she was around, and I received him coolly.

"Hello!" he said.

"Well?" I replied.

"Is that the way you greet me, Bab?"

"It's the way I would greet most any left-over," I said. "I eat hash at school, but I don't have to pretend to like it."

"I came to see YOU."

"How youthful of you!" I replied, in stinging tones.

He sat down on a bench and stared at me.

"What's got into you lately?" he said. "Just as you're getting to be the prettiest girl around, and I'm strong for you, you—you turn into a regular rattlesnake."

The kindness of his tone upset me considerably, to who so few kind words had come recently. I am compelled to confess that I wept, although I had not expected to, and indeed shed few tears, although bitter ones.

How could I possibly know that the chaste salute of Eddie Perkins and my head on Carter Brooks' shoulder were both plainly visible against the rising moon? But this was the case, especially from the house next door.

But I digress.

Suddenly Carter held me off and shook me somewhat.

"Sit up here and tell me about it," he said. "I'm getting more scared every minute. You are such an impulsive little beast, and you turn the fellows' heads so—look here, is Jane Raleigh lying, or did you run away and get married to someone?"

I am aware that I should have said, then and there, No. But it seemed a shame to spoil things just as they were getting interesting. So I said, through my tears:

"Nobody understands me. Nobody. And I'm so lonely."

"And of course you haven't run away with anyone, have you?"

"Not—exactly."

"Bless you, Bab!" he said. And I might as well say that he kissed me, because he did, although unexpectedly. Somebody just then moved a chair on the porch next door and coughed rather loudly, so Carter drew a long breath and got up.

"There's something about you lately, Bab, that I don't understand," he said. "You—you're mysterious. That's the word. In a couple of years you'll be the real thing."

"Come and see me then," I said in a demure manner. And he went away.

So I sat on my bench and looked at the sea and dreamed. It seemed to me that centuries must have passed since I was a lighthearted girl, running up and down that beach, paddling, and so forth, with no thought of the future farther away than my next meal.

Once I lived to eat. Now I merely ate to live, and hardly that. The fires of genius must be fed, but no more.

Sitting there, I suddenly made a discovery. The boat house was near me, and I realized that upstairs, above the bath-houses, et cetera, there must be a room or two. The very thought intrigued me (a new word for interest, but coming into use, and sounding well).

Solitude—how I craved it for my work. And here it was, or would be when I had got the place fixed up. True, the next door boat-house was close, but a boat-house is a quiet place, generally, and I knew that nowhere, aside from the desert, is there perfect silence.

I investigated at once, but found the place locked and the boatman gone. However, there was a lattice, and I climbed up that and got in. I had a fright there, as it seemed to be full of people, but I soon saw it was only the family bathing suits hung up to dry. Aside from the odor of drying things it was a fine study, and I decided to take a small table there, and the various tools of my profession.

Climbing down, however, I had a surprise. For a man was just below, and I nearly put my foot on his shoulder in the darkness.

"Hello!" he said. "So it's YOU."

I was quite speechless. It was Mr. Beecher himself, in his dinner clothes and bareheaded.

Oh fluttering heart, be still. Oh pen, move steadily. OH TEMPORA O MORES!

"Let me down," I said. I was still hanging to the lattice.

"In a moment," he said. "I have an idea that the instant I do you'll vanish. And I have something to tell you."

I could hardly believe my ears.

"You see," he went on, "I think you must move that bench."

"Bench?"

"You seem to be so very popular," he said. "And of course I'm only a transient and don't matter. But some evening one of the admirers may be on the Patten's porch, while another is with you on the bench. And—the Moon rises beyond it."

I was silent with horror. So that was what he thought of me. Like all the others, he, too, did not understand. He considered me a flirt, when my only thoughts were serious ones, of immortality and so on.

"You'd better come down now," he said. "I was afraid to warn you until I saw you climbing the lattice. Then I knew you were still young enough to take a friendly word of advice."

I got down then and stood before him. He was magnificent. Is there anything more beautiful than a tall man with a gleaming expanse of dress shirt? I think not.

But he was staring at me.

"Look here," he said. "I'm afraid I've made a mistake after all. I thought you were a little girl."

"That needn't worry you. Everybody does," I replied. "I'm seventeen, but I shall be a mere child until I come out."

"Oh!" he said.

"One day I am a child in the nursery," I said. "And the next I'm grown up and ready to be sold to the highest bidder."

"I beg your pardon, I——"

"But I am as grown up now as I will ever be," I said. "And indeed more so. I think a great deal now, because I have plenty of time. But my sister never thinks at all. She is too busy."

"Suppose we sit on the bench. The moon is too high to be a menace, and besides, I am not dangerous. Now, what do you think about?"

"About life, mostly. But of course there is death, which is beautiful but cold. And—one always thinks of love, doesn't one?"

"Does one?" he asked. I could see he was much interested. As for me, I dared not consider whom it was who sat beside me, almost touching. That way lay madness.

"Don't you ever," he said, "reflect on just ordinary things, like clothes and so forth?"

I shrugged my shoulders.

"I don't get enough new clothes to worry about. Mostly I think of my work."

"Work?"

"I am a writer" I said in a low, earnest tone.

"No! How—how amazing. What do you write?"

"I'm on a play now."

"A comedy?"

"No. A tragedy. How can I write a comedy when a play must always end in a catastrophe? The book says all plays end in crisis, denouement and catastrophe."

"I can't believe it," he said. "But, to tell you a secret, I never read any books about plays."

"We are not all gifted from berth, as you are," I observed, not to merely please him, but because I considered it the simple truth.

He pulled out his watch and looked at it in the moonlight.

"All this reminds me," he said, "that I have promised to go to work tonight. But this is so—er—thrilling that I guess the work can wait. Well—now go on."

Oh, the joy of that night! How can I describe it? To be at last in the company of one who understood, who—as he himself had said in "Her Soul"—spoke my own language! Except for the occasional mosquito, there was no sound save the tumescent sea and his voice.

Often since that time I have sat and listened to conversation. How flat it sounds to listen to father conversing about Gold, or Sis about Clothes, or even to the young men who come to call, and always talk about themselves.

We were at last interrupted in a strange manner. Mr. Patten came down their walk and crossed to us, walking very fast. He stopped right in front of us and said:

"Look here, Reg, this is about all I can stand."

"Oh, go away, and sing, or do something," said Mr. Beecher sharply.

"You gave me your word of honor" said the Patten man. "I can only remind you of that. Also of the expense I'm incurring, and all the rest of it. I've shown all sorts of patience, but this is the limit."

He turned on his heel, but came back for a last word or two.

"Now see here," he said, "we have everything fixed the way you said you wanted it. And I'll give you ten minutes. That's all."

He stalked away, and Mr. Beecher looked at me.

"Ten minutes of heaven," he said, "and then perdition with that bunch. Look here," he said, "I—I'm awfully interested in what you are telling me. Let's cut off up the beach and talk."

Oh night of nights! Oh moon of moons!

Our talk was strictly business. He asked me my plot, and although I had been warned not to do so, even to David Belasco, I gave it to him fully. And even now, when all is over, I am not sorry. Let him use it if he will. I can think of plenty of plots.

The real tragedy is that we met father. He had been ordered to give up smoking, and I considered he had done so, mother feeling that I should be encouraged in leaving off cigarettes. So when I saw the cigar I was sure it was not father. It proved to be, however, and although he passed with nothing worse than a glare, I knew I was in more trouble.

At last we reached the bench again, and I said good night. Our relations continued business-like to the last. He said:

"Good night, little authoress, and let's have some more talks."

"I'm afraid I've bored you," I said.

"Bored me!" he said. "I haven't spent such an evening for years!"

The family acted perfectly absurd about it. Seeing that they were going to make a fuss, I refused to say with whom I had been walking. You'd have thought I had committed a crime.

"It has come to this, Barbara," mother said, pacing the floor. "You cannot be trusted out of our sight. Where do you meet all these men? If this is how things are now, what will it be when given your liberty?"

Well, it is to painful to record. I was told not to leave the place for three days, although allowed the boat-house. And of course Sis had to chime in that she'd heard a rumor I had run away and got married, and although of course she knew it wasn't true, owing to no time to do so, still where there was smoke there was fire.

But I felt that their confidence in me was going, and that night, after all were in the land of dreams, I took that wretched suit of clothes and so on to the boathouse, and hid them in the rafters upstairs.

I come now to the strange event of the next day, and its sequel.

The Patten place and ours are close together, and no other house near. Mother had been very cool about the Pattens, owing to nobody knowing them that we knew. Although I must say they had the most interesting people all the time, and Sis was crazy to call and meet some of them.

Jane came that day to visit her aunt, and she ran down to see me first thing.

"Come and have a ride," she said. "I've got the runabout, and after that we'll bathe and have a real time."

But I shook my head.

"I'm a prisoner, Jane," I said.

"Honestly! Is it the play, or something else?"

"Something else, Jane," I said. "I can tell you nothing more. I am simply in trouble, as usual."

"But why make you a prisoner, unless——" She stopped suddenly and stared at me.

"He has claimed you!" she said. "He is here, somewhere about this place, and now, having had time to think it over, you do not want to go to him. Don't deny it. I see it in your face. Oh, Bab, my heart aches for you."

It sounded so like a play that I kept it up. Alas, with what results!

"What else can I do, Jane?" I said.

"You can refuse, if you do not love him. Oh Bab, I did not say it before, thinking you loved him. But no man who wears clothes like those could ever win my heart. At least, not permanently."

Well, she did most of the talking. She had finished the bath towel, which was a large size, after all, and monogrammed, and she made me promise never to let my husband use it. When she went away she left it with me, and I carried it out and put it on the rafters, with the other things—I seemed to be getting more to hide every day.

Things went all wrong the next day. Sis was in a bad temper, and as much as said I was flirting with Carter Brooks, although she never intends to marry him herself, owing to his not having money and never having asked her.

I spent the morning in fixing up a studio in the boat-house, and felt better by noon. I took two boards on trestles and made a desk, and brought a dictionary and some pens and ink out. I use a dictionary because now and then I am uncertain how to spell a word.

Events now moved swiftly and terribly. I did not do much work, being exhausted by my efforts to fix up the studio, and besides, feeling that nothing much was worth while when one's family did not and never would understand. At eleven o'clock Sis and Carter and Jane and some others went in bathing from our dock. Jane called up to me, but I pretended not to hear. They had a good time judging by the noise, although I should think Jane would cover her arms and neck in the water, being very thin. Legs one can do nothing with, although I should think stripes going around would help. But arms can have sleeves.

However—the people next door went in too, and I thrilled to the core when Mr. Beecher left the bath-house and went down to the beech. What a physique! What shoulders, all brown and muscular! And to think that, strong as they were, they wrote the tender love scenes of his plays. Strong and tender—what descriptive words they are! It was then that I saw he had been vaccinated twice.

To resume. All the Pattens went in, and a new girl with them, in a one piece suit. I do not deny that she was pretty. I only say that she was not modest, and that the way she stood on the Patten's dock and posed for Mr. Beecher's benefit was unnecessary and well, not respectable.

She was nothing to me, nor I to her. But I watched her closely. I confess that I was interested in Mr. Beecher. Why not? He was a public character, and entitled to respect. Nay, even to love. But I maintain and will to my dying day, that such love is different from that ordinarily born to the other sex, and a thing to be proud of.

Well, I was seeing a drama and did not even know it. After the rest had gone, Mr. Patten came to the door into Mr. Beecher's room in the bath-house—they are all in a row, with doors opening on the sand—and he had a box in his hand. He looked around, and no one was looking except me, and he did not see me. He looked very fierce and glum, and shortly after he carried in a chair and a folding card table. I thought this was very strange, but imagine how I felt when he came out carrying Mr. Beecher's clothes! He brought them all, going on his tiptoes and watching every minute. I felt like screaming.

However, I considered that it was a practical joke, and I am no spoil sport. So I sat still and waited. They stayed in the water a long time, and the girl with the figure was always crawling out on the dock and then diving in to show off. Leila and the rest got sick of her actions and came in to lunch. They called up to me, but I said I was not hungry.

"I don't know what's come over Bab," I heard Sis say to Carter Brooks. "She's crazy, I think."

"She's seventeen," he said. "That's all. They get over it mostly, but she has it hard."

I loathed him.

Pretty soon the other crowd came up, and I could see every one knew the joke but Mr. Beecher. They all scuttled into their doorways, and Mr. Patten waited till Mr. Beecher was inside and had thrown out the shirt of his bathing suit. Then he locked the door from the outside.

There was a silence for a minute. Then Mr. Beecher said in a terrible voice.

"So that's the game, is it?"

"Now listen, Reg," Mr. Patten said, in a soothing voice. "I've tried everything but force, and now I'm driven to that. I've got to have that third act. The company's got the first two acts well under way, and I'm getting wires about every hour. I've got to have that script."

"You go to Hell!" said Mr. Beecher. You could hear him plainly through the window, high up in the wall. And although I do not approve of an oath, there are times when it eases the tortured soul.

"Now be reasonable, Reg," Mr. Patten pleaded. "I've put a fortune in this thing, and you're lying down on the job. You could do it in four hours if you'd put your mind to it."

There was no answer to this. And he went on:

"I'll send out food or anything. But nothing to drink. There's champagne on the ice for you when you've finished, however. And you'll find pens and ink and paper on the table."

The answer to this was Mr. Beecher's full weight against the door. But it held, even against the full force of his fine physic.

"Even if you do break it open," Mr. Patten said, "you can't go very far the way you are. Now be a good fellow, and let's get this thing done. It's for your good as well as mine. You'll make a fortune out of it."

Then he went into his own door, and soon came out, looking like a gentleman, unless one knew, as I did, that he was a whited sepulcher.

How long I sat there, paralyzed with emotion, I do not know. Hannah came out and roused me from my trance of grief. She is a kindly soul, although too afraid of mother to be helpful.

"Come in like a good girl, Miss Bab," she said. "There's that fruit salad that cook prides herself on, and I'll ask her to brown a bit of sweetbread for you."

"Hannah," I said in a low voice, "there is a crime being committed in this neighborhood, and you talk to me of food."

"Good gracious, Miss Bab!"

"I cannot tell you any more than that, Hannah," I said gently, "because it is only being done now, and I cannot make up my mind about it. But of course I do not want any food."

As I say, I was perfectly gentle with her, and I do not understand why she burst into tears and went away.

I sat and thought it all over. I could not leave, under the circumstances. But yet, what was I to do? It was hardly a police matter, being between friends, as one may say, and yet I simply could not bare to leave my ideal there in that damp bath-house without either food or, as one may say, raiment.

About the middle of the afternoon it occurred to me to try to find a key for the lock of the bath-house. I therefore left my studio and proceeded to the house. I passed close by the fatal building, but there was no sound from it.

I found a number of trunk-keys in a drawer in the library, and was about to escape with them, when father came in. He gave me a long look, and said:

"Bee still buzzing?"

I had hoped for some understanding from him, but my spirits fell at this speech.

"I am still working, father," I said, in a firm if nervous tone. "I am not doing as good work as I would if things were different, but—I am at least content, if not happy."

He stared at me, and then came over to me.

"Put out your tongue," he said.

Even against this crowning infamy I was silent.

"That's all right," he said. "Now see here, Chicken, get into your riding togs and we'll order the horses. I don't intend to let this play-acting upset your health."

But I refused. "Unless, of course, you insist," I finished. He only shook his head, however, and left the room. I felt that I had lost my last friend.

I did not try the keys myself, but instead stood off a short distance and threw them through the window. I learned later that they struck Mr. Beecher on the head. Not knowing, of course, that I had flung them, and that my reason was pure friendliness and idealism, he threw them out again with a violent exclamation. They fell at my feet, and lay there, useless, rejected, tragic.

At last I summoned courage to speak.

"Can't I do something to help?" I said, in a quaking voice, to the window.

There was no answer, but I could hear a pen scratching on paper.

"I do so want to help you," I said, in a louder tone.

"Go, away" said his voice, rather abstracted than angry.

"May I try the keys?" I asked. Be still, my heart! For the scratching had ceased.

"Who's that?" asked the beloved voice. I say 'beloved' because an ideal is always beloved. The voice was beloved, but sharp.

"It's me."

I heard him mutter something, and I think he came to the door.

"Look here," he said. "Go away. Do you understand? I want to work. And don't come near here again until seven o'clock."

"Very well," I said faintly.

"And then come without fail," he said.

"Yes, Mr. Beecher," I replied. How commanding he was! Strong but tender!

"And if anyone comes around making a noise, before that, you shoot them for me, will you?"

"SHOOT them?"

"Drive them off, or use a bean-shooter. Anything. But don't yell at them. It distracts me."

It was a sacred trust. I, and only I, stood between him and his MAGNUM OPUS. I sat down on the steps of our bath-house, and took up my vigil.

It was about five o'clock when I heard Jane approaching. I knew it was Jane, because she always wears tight shoes, and limps when unobserved. Although having the reputation of the smallest foot of any girl in our set in the city, I prefer comfort and ease, unhampered by heals—French or otherwise. No man will ever marry a girl because she wears a small shoe, and catches her heals in holes in the boardwalk, and has to soak her feet at night before she can sleep. However——

Jane came on, and found me crouched on the doorstep, in a lowly attitude, and holding my finger to my lips.

She stopped and stared at me.

"Hello," she said. "What do you think you are? A statue?"

"Hush, Jane," I said, in a low tone. "I can only ask you to be quiet and speak in whispers. I cannot give the reason."

"Good heavens!" she whispered. "What has happened, Bab?"

"It is happening now, but I cannot explain."

"WHAT is happening?"

"Jane," I whispered, earnestly, "you have known me a long time and I have always been trustworthy, have I not?"

She nodded. She is never exactly pretty, and now she had opened her mouth and forgot to close it.

"Then ask no questions. Trust me, as I am trusting you." It seemed to me that Mr. Beecher threw his pen at the door, and began to pace the bath-house. Owing of course to his being in his bare feet, I was not certain. Jane heard something, too, for she clutched my arm.

"Bab," she said, in intense tones, "if you don't explain I shall lose my mind. I feel now that I am going to shriek."

She looked at me searchingly.

"Somebody is a prisoner. That's all."

It was the truth, was it not? And was there any reasons for Jane Raleigh to jump to conclusions as she did, and even to repeat later in public that I had told her that my lover had come for me, and that father had locked him up to prevent my running away with him, immuring him in the Patten's bath-house? Certainly not.

Just then I saw the boatman coming who looks after our motor boat, and I tiptoed to him and asked him to go away, and not to come back unless he had quieter boats and would not whistle. He acted very ugly about it, I must say, but he went.

When I came back, Jane was sitting thinking, with her forehead all puckered.

"What I don't understand, Bab," she said, "is, why no noise?"

"Because he is writing," I explained. "Although his clothing has been taken away, he is writing. I don't think I told you, Jane, but that is his business. He is a writer. And if I tell you his name you will faint with surprise."

She looked at me searchingly.

"Locked up—and writing, and his clothing gone! What's he writing, Bab? His will?"

"He is doing his duty to the end, Jane," I said softly. "He is writing the last act of a play. The company is rehearsing the first two acts, and he has to get this one ready, though the heavens fall."

But to my surprise, she got up and said to me, in a firm voice:

"Either you are crazy, Barbara Archibald, or you think I am. You've been stuffing me for about a week, and I don't believe a word of it. And you'll apologize to me or I'll never speak to you again."

She said this loudly, and then went away, And Mr. Beecher said, through the door.

"What the devil's the row about?"

Perhaps my nerves were going, or possibly it was no luncheon and probably no dinner. But I said, just as if he had been an ordinary person:

"Go on and write and get through. I can't stew on these steps all day."

"I thought you were an amiable child."

"I'm not amiable and I'm not a child."

"Don't spoil your pretty face with frowns."

"It's MY face. And you can't see it anyhow," I replied, venting in feminine fashion, my anger at Jane on the nearest object.

"Look here," he said, through the door, "you've been my good angel. I'm doing more work than I've done in two months, although it was a dirty, low-down way to make me do it. You're not going back on me now, are you?"

Well, I was mollified, as who would not be? So I said:

"Well?"

"What did Patten do with my clothes?"

"He took them with him." He was silent, except for a muttered word.

"You might throw those keys back again," he said. "Let me know first, however. You're the most accurate thrower I've ever seen."

So I threw them through the window and I believe hit the ink bottle. But no matter. And he tried them, but none availed.

So he gave up, and went back to work, having saved enough ink to finish with. But a few minutes later he called to me again, and I moved to the doorstep, where I sat listening, while apparently admiring the sea. He explained that having been thus forced, he had almost finished the last act, and it was a corker. And he said if he had his clothes and some money, and a key to get out, he'd go right back to town with it and put it in rehearsal. And at the same time he would give the Pattens something to worry about over night. Because, play or no play, it was a rotten thing to lock a man in a bath-house and take his clothes away.

"But of course I can't get my clothes," he said. "They'll take cussed good care of that. And there's the key too. We're up against it, little sister."

Although excited by his calling me thus, I retained my faculties, and said:

"I have a suit of clothes you can have."

"Thanks awfully," he said. "But from the slight acquaintance we have had, I don't believe they would fit me."

"Gentleman's clothes," I said frigidly.

"You have?"

"In my studio," I said. "I can bring them, if you like. They look quite good, although creased."

"You know" he said, after a moment's silence, "I can't quite believe this is really happening to me! Go and bring the suit of clothes, and—you don't happen to have a cigar, I suppose?"

"I have a large box of cigarettes."

"It is true," I heard him say through the door. "It is all true. I am here, locked in. The play is almost done. And a very young lady on the doorstep is offering me a suit of clothes and tobacco. I pinch myself. I am awake."

Alas! Mingled with my joy at serving my ideal there was also grief. My idle had feet of clay. He was a slave, like the rest of us, to his body. He required clothes and tobacco. I felt that, before long, he might even ask for an apple, or something to stay the pangs of hunger. This I felt I could not bare.

Perhaps I would better pass over quickly the events of the next hour. I got the suit and the cigarettes, and even Jane's bath towel, and threw them in to him. Also I believe he took a shower, as I heard the water running, At about seven o'clock he said he had finished the play. He put on the clothes which he observed almost fitted him, although gayer than he usually wore, and said that if I would give him a hair pin he thought he could pick the lock. But he did not succeed.

Being now dressed, however, he drew a chair to the window and we talked together. It seemed like a dream that I should be there, on such intimate terms with a great playwright, who had just, even if under compulsion, finished a last act, I bared my very soul to him, such as about resembling Julia Marlowe, and no one understanding my craving to achieve a place in the world of art. We were once interrupted by Hannah looking for me for dinner. But I hid in a bath-house, and she went away.

What was food to me compared with such a conversation?

When Hannah had disappeared, he said suddenly:

"It's rather unusual, isn't it, your having a suit of clothes and everything in your—er—studio?"

But I did not explain fully, merely saving that it was a painful story.

At half past seven I saw mother on the veranda looking for me, and I ducked out of sight, I was by this time very hungry, although I did not like to mention the fact, But Mr. Beecher made a suggestion, which was this: that the Pattens were evidently going to let him starve until he got through work, and that he would see them in perdition before he would be the butt for their funny remarks when they freed him. He therefore tried to escape out the window, but stuck fast, and finally gave it up.

At last he said:

"Look here, you're a curious child, but a nervy one. How'd you like to see if you can get the key? If you do we'll go to a hotel and have a real meal, and we can talk about your career."

Although quivering with terror, I consented. How could I do otherwise, with such a prospect? For now I began to see that all other emotions previously felt were as nothing to this one. I confess, without shame, that I felt the stirring of the tender passion in my breast. Ah me, that it should have died ere it had hardly lived!

"Where is the key?" I asked, in a rapt but anxious tone.

He thought a while.

"Generally," he said, "it hangs on a nail at the back entry. But the chances are that Patten took it up to his room this time, for safety, You'd know it if you saw it. It has some buttons off somebody's bathing suit tied to it."

Here it was necessary to hide again, as father came stocking out, calling me in an angry tone. But shortly after-wards I was on my way to the Patten's house, on shaking knees. It was by now twilight, that beautiful period of romance, although the dinner hour also. Through the dusk I sped, toward what? I knew not.

The Pattens and the one-piece lady were at dinner, and having a very good time, in spite of having locked a guest in the bath-house. Being used to servants and prowling around, since at one time when younger I had a habit of taking things from the pantry, I was quickly able to see that the key was not in the entry. I therefore went around to the front door and went in, being prepared, if discovered, to say that someone was in their bath-house and they ought to know it. But I was not heard among their sounds of revelry, and was able to proceed upstairs, which I did.

But not having asked which was Mr. Patten's room, I was at a loss and almost discovered by a maid who was turning down the beds—much too early, also, and not allowed in the best houses until nine-thirty, since otherwise the rooms look undressed and informal.

I had but time to duck into another chamber, and from there to a closet.

I REMAINED IN THAT CLOSET ALL NIGHT.

I will explain. No sooner had the maid gone than a woman came into the room and closed the door. I heard her moving around and I suddenly felt that she was going to bed, and might get her robe de nuit out of the closet. I was petrified. But it seems, while she really WAS undressing at that early hour, the maid had laid her night clothes out, and I was saved.

Very soon a knock came to the door, and somebody came in, like Mrs. Patten's voice and said: "You're not going to bed, surely!"

"I'm going to pretend to have a sick headache," said the other person, and I knew it was the one-piece lady. "He's going to come back in a frenzy, and he'll take it out on me, unless I'm prepared."

"Poor Reggie!" said Mrs. Patten, "To think of him locked in there alone, and no clothes or anything. It's too funny for words."

"You're not married to him."

My heart stopped beating. Was SHE married to him? She was indeed. My dream was over. And the worst part of it was that for a married man I had done without food or exercise and now stood in a hot closet in danger of a terrible fuss.

"No, thank heaven!" said Mrs. Patten. "But it was the only way to make him work. He is a lazy dog. But don't worry. We'll feed him before he sees you. He's always rather tractable after he's fed."

Were ALL my dreams to go? Would they leave nothing to my shattered illusions? Alas, no.

"Jolly him a little, too," said——can I write it?—Mrs. Beecher. "Tell him he's the greatest thing in the world. That will help some. He's vain, you know, awfully vain. I expect he's written a lot of piffle."

Had they listened they would have heard a low, dry sob, wrung from my tortured heart. But Mrs. Beecher had started a vibrator, and my anguished cry was lost.

"Well," said Mrs. Patten, "Will has gone down to let him out, I expect he'll attack him. He's got a vile temper. I'll sit with you till he comes back, if you don't mind. I'm feeling nervous."

It was indeed painful to recall the next half hour. I must tell the truth however. They discussed us, especially mother, who had not called. They said that we thought we were the whole summer colony, although every one was afraid of mother's tongue, and nobody would marry Leila, except Carter Brooks, and he was poor and no prospects. And that I was an incorrigible, and carried on something ghastly, and was going to be put in a convent. I became justly furious and was about to step out and tell them a few plain facts, when somebody hammered at the door and then came in. It was Mr. Patten.

"He's gone!" he said.

"Well, he won't go far, in bathing trunks," said Mrs. Beecher.

"That's just it. His bathing trunks are there."

"Well, he won't go far without them!"

"He's gone so far I can't locate him."

I heard Mrs. Beecher get up.

"Are you in earnest, Will?" she said. "Do you mean that he has gone without a stitch of clothes, and can't be found?"

Mrs. Patten gave a sort of screech.

"You don't think—oh Will, he's so temperamental. You don't think he's drowned himself?"

"No such luck," said Mrs. Beecher, in a cold tone. I hated her for it. True, he had deceived me. He was not as I had thought him. In our two conversations he had not mentioned his wife, leaving me to believe him free to love "where he listed," as the poet says.

"There are a few clues," said Mr. Patten. "He got out by means of a wire hairpin, for one thing. And he took the manuscript with him, which he'd hardly have done if he meant to drown himself. Or even if, as we fear, he had no pockets. He has smoked a lot of cigarettes out of a candy box, which I did not supply him, and he left behind a bath towel that does not, I think, belong to us."

"I should think he would have worn it," said Mrs. Beecher, in a scornful tone.

"Here's the bath towel," Mr. Patten went on. "You may recognize the initials. I don't."

"B. P. A.," said Mrs. Beecher. "Look here, don't they call that—that flibbertigibbet next door 'Barbara'?"

"The little devil!" said Mr. Patten, in a raging tone. "She let him out, and of course he's done no work on the play or anything. I'd like to choke her."

Nobody spoke then, and my heart beat fast and hard. I leave it to anybody, how they'd like to be shut in a closet and threatened with a violent death from without. Would or would they not ever be the same person afterwords?

"I'll tell you what I'd do," said the Beecher woman. "I'd climb up the back of father, next door, and tell him what his little daughter has done, because I know she's mixed up in it, towel or no towel. Reg is always sappy when they're seventeen. And she's been looking moon-eyed at him for days."

Well, the Pattens went away, and Mrs. Beecher manicured her nails,—I could hear her filing them—and sang around and was not much concerned, although for all she knew he was in the briny deep, a corpse. How true it is that "the paths of glory lead but to the grave."

I got very tired and much hotter, and I sat down on the floor. After what seemed like hours, Mrs. Patten came back, all breathless, and she said:

"The girl's gone too, Clare."

"What girl?"

"Next door. If you want excitement, they've got it. The mother is in hysterics and there's a party searching the beach for her body. The truth is, of course, if that towel means anything."

"That Reg has run away with her, of course," said Mrs. Beecher, in a resigned tone. "I wish he would grow up and learn something. He's becoming a nuisance. And when there are so many interesting people to run away with, to choose that chit!"

Yes, she said that, And in my retreat I could but sit and listen, and of course perspire, which I did freely. Mrs. Patten went away, after talking about the "scandal" for some time. And I sat and thought of the beach being searched for my body, a thought which filled my eyes with tears of pity for what might have been, I still hoped Mrs. Beecher would go to bed, but she did not. Through the key hole I could see her with a book, reading, and not caring at all that Mr. Beecher's body, and mine too, might be washing about in the cruel sea, or have eloped to New York.

I loathed her.

At last I must have slept, for a bell rang, and there I was still in the closet, and she was answering it.

"Arrested?" she said, "Well, I should think he'd better be, if what you say about clothing is true.... Well, then—what's he arrested for?... Oh, kidnapping! Well, if I'm any judge, they ought to arrest the Archibald girl for kidnapping HIM. No, don't bother me with it tonight. I'll try to read myself to sleep."

So this was marriage! Did she flee to her unjustly accused husband's side and comfort him? Not she. She went to bed.

At daylight, being about smothered, I opened the closet door and drew a breath of fresh air. Also I looked at her, and she was asleep, with her hair in patent wavers. Ye gods!

The wife of Reginald Beecher thus to distort her looks at night! I could not bare it.

I averted my eyes, and on my tiptoes made for the window.

My sufferings were over. In a short time I had slid down and was making my way through the dewy morn toward my home. Before the sun was up, or more than starting, I had climbed to my casement by means of a wire trellis, and put on my 'robe de nuit'. But before I settled to sleep I went to the pantry and there satisfied the pangs of hunger having had nothing since breakfast the day before. All the lights seemed to be on, on the lower floor, which I considered wasteful of Tanney, the butler. But being sleepy, gave it no further thought. And so to bed, as the great English dairy-keeper, Pepys, had said in his dairy.

It seemed but a few moments later that I heard a scream, and opening my eyes, saw Leila in the doorway. She screamed again, and mother came and stood beside her. Although very drowsy, I saw that they still wore their dinner clothes.

They stared as if transfixed, and then mother gave a low moan, and said to Sis:

"That unfortunate man has been in jail all night."

And Sis said: "Jane Raleigh is crazy. That's all." Then they looked at me, and mother burst into tears. But Sis said:

"You little imp! Don't tell me you've been in that bed all night. I KNOW BETTER."

I closed my eyes. They were not of the understanding sort, and never would be.

"If that's the way you feel I shall tell you nothing," I said wearily.

"WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?" mother said, in a slow and dreadful voice.

Well, I saw then that a part of the truth must be disclosed, especially since she has for some time considered sending me to a convent, although without cause, and has not done so for fear of my taking the veil. So I told her this. I said:

"I spent the night shut in a clothes closet, but where is my secret. I cannot tell you."

"Barbara! You MUST tell me."

"It is not my secret alone, mother."

She caught at the foot of the bed.

"Who was shut with you in that closet?" she demanded in a shaking voice. "Barbara, there is another wretched man in all this. It could not have been Mr. Beecher, because he has been in the station house all night."

I sat up, leaning on one elbow, and looked at her earnestly.

"Mother" I said, "you have done enough damage, interfering with careers—not only mine, but another's imperiled now by not having a last act. I can tell you no more, except"—here my voice took on a deep and intense fiber—"that I have done nothing to be ashamed of, although unconventional."

Mother put her hands to her face, and emitted a low, despairing cry.

"Come," Leila said to her, as to a troubled child. "Come, and Hannah can use the vibrator on your spine."

So she went, but before she left she said:

"Barbara, if you will only promise to be a good girl, and give us a chance to live this scandal down, I will give you anything you ask for."

"Mother!" Sis said, in an angry tone.

"What can I do, Leila?" mother said. "The girl is attractive, and probably men will always be following her and making trouble. Think of last winter. I know it is bribery, but it is better than scandal."

"I want nothing, mother," I said, in a low, heart stricken tone, "save to be allowed to live my own life and to have a career."

"My heavens," mother said, "if I hear that word again, I'll go crazy."

So she went away, and Sis came over and looked down at me.

"Well!" she said. "What's happened anyhow? Of course you've been up to some mischief, but I don't suppose anybody will ever know the truth of it. I was hoping you'd make it this time and get married, and stop worrying us."

"Go away, please, and let me sleep," I said. "As to getting married, under no circumstances did I expect to marry him. He has a wife already. Personally, I think she's a total loss. She wears patent wavers at night, and sleeps with her mouth open. But who am I to interfere with the marriage bond? I never have and never will."

But Sis only gave me a wild look and went away.

This, dear readers and schoolmates, is the true story of my meeting with and parting from Reginald Beecher, the playwright. Whatever the papers may say, it is not true, except the fact that he was recognized by Jane Raleigh, who knew the suit he wore, when in the act of pawning his ring to get money to escape from his captors (I. E., The Pattens). It was the necktie which struck her first, and also his guilty expression. As I was missing by that time, Jane put two and two together and made an elopement.

Sometimes I sit and think things over, my fingers wandering "over the ivory keys" of the typewriter they gave me to promise not to elope with anybody—although such a thing is far from my mind—and the world seems a cruel and unjust place, especially to those with ambition.

For Reginald Beecher is no longer my ideal, my night of the pen. I will tell about that in a few words.

Jane Raleigh and I went to a matinee late in September before returning to our institutions of learning. Jane clutched my arm as we looked at our programs and pointed to something.

How my heart beat! For whatever had come between us, I was still loyal to him.

This was a new play by him!

"Ah," my heart seemed to say, "now again you will hear his dear words, although spoken by alien mouths.

"The love scenes——"

I could not finish. Although married and forever beyond me, I could still hear his manly tones as issuing from the door of the Bath-house. I thrilled with excitement. As the curtain rose I closed my eyes in ecstasy.

"Bab!" Jane said, in a quavering tone.

I looked. What did I see? The bath-house itself, the very one. And as I stared I saw a girl, wearing her hair as I wear mine, cross the stage with a bunch of keys in her hand, and say to the bath-house door.

"Can't I do something to help? I do so want to help you."

MY VERY WORDS.

And a voice from beyond the bath-house door said:

"Who's that?"

HIS WORDS.

I could bare no more. Heedless of Jane's protests and anguish, I got up and went out, into the light of day. My body was bent with misery. Because at last I knew that, like mother and all the rest, he too, did not understand me and never would! To him I was but material, the stuff that plays are made of!

And now we know that he never could know,

And did not understand.

Kipling.

Ignoring Jane's observation that the tickets had cost two dollars each, I gathered up the scattered skeins of my life together, and fled.