but we decided before we went to bed to let the hero of "The
Emergence" get beaten up a little in the strike before he made his great
speech to the capitalist. I felt so happy for the play.

But the next day Peter took tea alone with Miss Editha Morris
Carruthers, and he was so charmed with her that he almost decided to let
the whole play end in separation.

"But it is so lonely for a woman to be a heroine of a separation,
Peter," I pleaded with him as we sauntered up and down the long porch.

"Under such stress souls grow, Betty," he answered, gloomily. "Together
lovers feed on the material; apart, on the immaterial. Can we say which
is best for the final emergence of the superman and--" Just here Julia
came across the street and into our front gate, looking like a ripe
peach, in a pink muslin gown, with a huge plate of hickory-nut
butter-candy in her hand, and we all three proceeded to material
nourishment. I left them for a few minutes while I went up to my room
and took out Grandmother Nelson's book. I wanted to be sure that not a
single thing would bloom before I got back to The Briers. Peter had
insisted that he should not go forth into the wilderness until he could
do it dramatically to stay, so I hadn't been out for five days or more
and I was wild--simply mad. To have a garden and be separated from it at
sprouting and blooming time is worse than any soul separation that ever
happened to any woman. Of that I feel sure.

Sue Bankhead was as nice and lovely to Peter as could be, and even Billy
Robertson's contentment with himself was slightly ruffled with the way
she took him out horseback with her every morning, but her crowning
attention was a dance for him. Sue has the loveliest dances in Hayesboro
because of her own charm and the fact that the double parlors in the old
Bankhead house are sixty-two feet long and forty-six feet wide. The
girls were as lovely as a bunch of spring blossoms, and Julia looked
like the most gorgeous, pink, fragrant, drooping cabbage-rose as Peter
danced with her again and again. I was so glad, because he is as tall as
she is, and she is such a good dancer that it must have been as soothing
to his tired nerves as a nice wide rocking-chair with billows of blue
mull cushions. It was easy to see what she thought of him from the way
she looked at him, and poor Pink took me out in the moonlight and swore
at me in polite language.

"Why don't you feed your sick poet your own self, Betty