ting mill. For _Marguerite of the Mud Flats_ I made
special studies for months and months."

"Of what sort?" we asked.

"In mud. Learning to model it. You see for a story of that sort the
first thing needed is a thorough knowledge of mud--all kinds of it."

"And what are you doing next?" we inquired.

"My next book," said the Lady Novelist, "is to be a study--tea?--of the
pickle industry--perfectly new ground."

"A fascinating field," we murmured.

"And quite new. Several of our writers have done the slaughter-house,
and in England a good deal has been done in jam. But so far no one has
done pickles. I should like, if I could," added Ethelinda Afterthought,
with the graceful modesty that is characteristic of her, "to make it the
first of a series of pickle novels, showing, don't you know, the whole
pickle district, and perhaps following a family of pickle workers for
four or five generations."

"Four or five!" we said enthusiastically. "Make it ten! And have you any
plan for work beyond that?"

"Oh, yes indeed," laughed the Lady Novelist. "I am always planning
ahead. What I want to do after that is a study of the inside of a
penitentiary."

"Of the _inside_?" we said, with a shudder.

"Yes. To do it, of course, I shall go to jail for two or three years!"

"But how can you get in?" we asked, thrilled at the quiet determination
of the frail woman before us.

"I shall demand it as a right," she answered quietly. "I shall go to
the authorities, at the head of a band of enthusiastic women, and demand
that I shall be sent to jail. Surely after the work I have done, that
much is coming to me."

"It certainly is," we said warmly.

We rose to go.

Both the novelists shook hands with us with great cordiality. Mr.
Afterthought walked as far as the front door with us and showed us a
short cut past the beehives that could take us directly through the bull
pasture to the main road.

We walked away in the gathering darkness of evening very quietly. We
made up our mind as we went that novel writing is not for us. We must
reach the penitentiary in some other way.

But we thought it well to set down our interview as a guide to others.

IX. The New Education

"So you're going back to college in a fortnight," I said to the Bright
Young Thing on the veranda of the summer hotel. "Aren't you sorry?"

"In a way I am," she said, "but in another sense I'm glad to go back.
One can't loaf all the time."

She looke