itten. I used to wonder why Andersen was given to children; not that
I wouldn't have them read him, but he is one of the profound thinkers
of the world. No one had Andersen clubs, or professed to find deep and
wonderful esoteric truths in his stories, but they are there. Do you
remember my girls' club down on--I don't think there were any streets,
but the inhabitants called the place 'Kerry Patch'?"

"Why, no," said Adam, "I didn't know you had one; why didn't you tell
me?"

"That was ever so long ago, ages and ages,--when you came to see--"
She paused a little, and then spoke the personal pronoun that tells
the whole story, for a woman can say "him" in such a way as to betray
unspeakable heights of adoration or abysses of loathing. She went on
slowly. "You were not one of my friends then; how could you be, if
there existed anything in common between you two? That sounds
dreadful, but you know all about it so well that subterfuges are
useless."

"To tell the truth, I never cared anything about him at all," Adam
answered quickly. "Like a good many others, I was enthusiastic over
your voice. He asked me to the house to hear you sing, and I went, and
was glad of the chance. And you have never sung for me once this
year."

"You never asked me," she answered. "'A dumb priest loses his
benefice.' But I was speaking of my club. We studied Andersen all
winter, and got enough more out of him than a lot of us who pored over
Ibsen, guided by a literary expert. Andersen has a more beautiful, a
more inspiring philosophy. Every nation has its story of Psyche, the
lost soul of things, but none is more beautiful than the tale of Gerda
and Kay. There were children in that club who were cruel, horribly
cruel, and one day when we gave an entertainment for them, one of the
older girls recited the story of 'The Daisy and the Lark.' They cried
as I had cried over it years before."

"I remember," he said. "It broke my heart when I was a little shaver.
I couldn't give so sad a story as that to a child."

"Oh, yes, you could," she said, "if the child needed it. The world was
cruel, cruel, Adam; I used to wonder sometimes why God did not blot it
all out, as He has blotted it out now. Once in another club, a big,
swell affair, there was a Humane Society programme. One woman, in a
Persian lamb jacket, spoke on the evils of the overcheck; you know how
they get that wool? And women nodded the aigrettes in their bonnets,
torn from the old bir