Rose MacLeod

								

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