ily the fairies gave her a selfishly kind
heart, and there's a piece of it left, I think. It may even win the duel
for her in the end. More and more she's the reckless patron of all the
arts, almost smothering ennui under her benefactions. She'd smother poor
me, too, if I'd let her; but I can't; I'm either not brazen enough or
not Christian enough to let her patronize me for her own amusement. And
that's her one new sensation for the last three years!

"Still, I've one thing to thank her for, and I wish I could feel
grateful. She introduced me, at one of her Arabian-Nightish _soirees
musicales_, to Hadow Bury, proprietor of _Whim_, the smarty-party weekly
review. In two years it's made a sky-rocketing success, by printing the
harum-scarumest possible comment on all the social and aesthetic fads and
freaks of the day--just the iris froth of the wave, that and that only.
Hadow's a big, black, bleak man-mountain. You'd take him for an
undertaker by special appointment to coal-beef-and-iron kings. You'd
never suspect him of having capitalized the Frivolous. But he's found it
means bagfuls of reelers for him, so he takes it seriously. He's after
the _goods_. He gets and delivers the goods, no matter what they cost.
He's ready to pay any price now for a new brand of cerebral champagne.

"Well, I didn't know _what_ he was when Mona casually dropped me beside
him, but he loomed so big and black and bleak he frightened me--till my
thoughts chattered! I rattled on--like this, Jimmy--only not because I
wanted to, but because having madly started I didn't know how to stop. I
made a fool of myself--utter; with the result that he detected a
slightly different flavor in my folly, a possibly novel _bouquet_--let's
call it the 'Birch Street _bouquet_.' At any rate, he finally silenced
me to ask whether I could write as I talked, and I said I hoped not; and
he looked bleaker and blacker than ever and said that was the worst of
it, so few amusing young women could! It seemed to be one of the more
annoying laws of Nature.

"The upshot was, I found out all about him and his ambitions for
_Whim_; and the fantastic upshot of _that_ was, I'm now doing a nonsense
column a week for him--have been for the past five--and getting fifty
dollars a week for my nonsense, too! I sign the thing "Dax"--a signature
invented by shutting both eyes and punching at my typewriter three
times, just to see what would happen. "Dax" happened, and I'm to be
allowe