Rose MacLeod

								

mingling of deprecating and amused inquiry. In spite of her years she
looked like a little animal which, having done wrong, seeks out means of
propitiation, and as yet knows nothing better than the lifted eyebrow of
inquiry.
"Well," she said again defiantly, "I made them up."
"In God's name, Florrie, what for?"
"I wanted to."
"To pad out your book?"
"To make a nice book, the kind of one I wanted. I'll tell you what,
Billy,"--she bowled caution into the farthest distance,--"I'm going to
make a clean breast of it. Now you won't peach?"
He shook his head.
"Go on," he bade her.
She lifted her head, sat straighter in her chair, and spoke with
firmness:--
"Now, Billy, if I'm going to talk to you at all, you must know precisely
where I stand. Maybe you do, but I don't believe it. You see, all these
years I've been writing what I called novels, and they've paid me a
little, and I've got up a sort of local fame. I'm as poor--well, I can't
tell you how poor. Only I live here in the summer with Electra in her
house--"
"It's the old Fulton house."
"Yes, but it came to her through her father. Remember, I was a second
wife. I had no children. My husband gave me the Cambridge place and left
this to his son."
"What became of the Cambridge house?"
"Sold, years ago. Eaten up. Seems as if I'd done nothing, all these
years, but eat. It makes me sick to think of it. Well, here was I,
credit low, my little knack at writing all but gone--why, Billy, styles
have changed since my day. Folks would hoot at my novels now. They don't
read them. They just remember I wrote them when they want a celebrity at
a tea. I'm a back number. Don't you know it?"
He nodded, gravely pondering. The one thing about him never to be
affected by his whimsical humor was the integrity of a business verdict.
Madam Fulton now was warming to the value of her own position. She began
to see how picturesque it was.
"Well, then up rises one of your precious publishers and says to me,
'Mrs. Fulton, you have known all the celebrated people. Why not write
your recollections?' 'Why not?' says I. Well, I went home and sat down
and wrote. And when I looked back at my life, I found it dull. So I gave
myself a free hand. I described the miserable thing as it ought to have
been, not as it was."
William Stark was leaning forward, looking her in the face, his hands on
his knees, as if to steady him through an amazing crisis.
"Florrie," he began, "do you mean to say you made up most of the letters
in that book?"
"Most of them? Every one! I hadn't any letters from celebrities. Days
when I might have had, I didn't care a button about the eggs they were
cackling over, and I didn't know they were going to be celebrities,
then, did I?"
"Do you mean the recollections of Brook Farm, taken down from the lips
of the old poet as he had it from a member of the fraternity there--"
"Faked, dear boy, faked, every one of them." She was gathering