USAN: Jimmy? You thought----

I: I think so even now. How can I help it?
Look.... [And here you must suppose me to show her
those first scrawled sheets, written automatically
by her hand.] Perhaps I'm revealing your own heart
to you, Susan--dragging to light what you've tried
to keep hidden even from yourself. See, dear. "A
net. No means of escape from it. To
escape--somehow. Jimmy----"

[And then Susan would perhaps have handed back
those scrawled pages to me with a pitying and
pitiful smile.]

SUSAN:

[_Author's Note_: This carefully written,
imaginary speech has been deleted _in toto_ by
Censor Susan from the page proof--at considerable
expense to me--and the following authentic
confession substituted for it in her own hand. But
she doesn't know I am making this explanation,
which will account to you for the form and manner
of her confession, purposely designed to be a
continuation of my own imaginary flight. In
admitting this, I am risking Susan's displeasure;
but conscience forbids me to let you mistake a
"genuine human document"--so dear to the modern
heart--for a mere effort at interpretation by an
amateur psychologist. What follows, then, is
veracious, is essentially that solemn thing so
dear to a truth-loving generation--sheer _fact_.]

Ambo dear, I can explain that, but not without a
long, unhappy confession. Must I? It's a shadowy,
inside-of-me story, awfully mixed and muddled; not
a nice story at all. Won't it be better, all
round, if I simply say again that I love _you_,
not Jimmy, with all my heart?

[No doubt I should then have reached for her
hands, and she would have drawn away.]

Ah, no, dear, please not! I've never made a clean
breast of it all, even to myself. It's got to be
done, though, Ambo, sooner or later, for both our
sakes. Be patient with me. I'll begin at the
beginning.

I'm ridiculously young, Ambo; we all keep
forgetting how young I am! I'm an infant prodigy,
really; you and Phil--and God first, I
suppose--have made me so. And the m