n
to see how picturesque it was.

"Well, then up rises one of your precious publishers and says to me,
'Mrs. Fulton, you have known all the celebrated people. Why not write
your recollections?' 'Why not?' says I. Well, I went home and sat down
and wrote. And when I looked back at my life, I found it dull. So I gave
myself a free hand. I described the miserable thing as it ought to have
been, not as it was."

William Stark was leaning forward, looking her in the face, his hands on
his knees, as if to steady him through an amazing crisis.

"Florrie," he began, "do you mean to say you made up most of the letters
in that book?"

"Most of them? Every one! I hadn't any letters from celebrities. Days
when I might have had, I didn't care a button about the eggs they were
cackling over, and I didn't know they were going to be celebrities,
then, did I?"

"Do you mean the recollections of Brook Farm, taken down from the lips
of the old poet as he had it from a member of the fraternity there--"

"Faked, dear boy, faked, every one of them." She was gathering
cheerfulness by the way.

"The story of Hawthorne and the first edition--"

"Hypothetical. Grouse in the gun-room."

"Do you mean that the story of the old slave who came to your mother's
door in Waltham, and the three abolitionists on their way to the
meeting--"

"Now what's the use, Billy Stark?" cried the old lady. "I told you it
was a fake from beginning to end. So it is. So is every page of it. If
I'd written my recollections as they were, the book would have been a
pamphlet of twenty odd pages. It would have said I married a learned
professor because I thought if I got into Cambridge society I should see
life, and life was what I wanted. It would have gone on to say I found
it death and nothing else, and when my husband died I spent all the
money I could get trying to see life and I never saw it then. Who'd have
printed that? Pretty recollections, I should say!"

Mr. Stark was still musing, his eyes interrogating her.

"It's really incredible, Florrie," he said at last. "Poor dear! you
needed the money."

"That wasn't it."

"Then what was?"

"I don't know." But immediately her face folded up into its smiling
creases and she said, "I wanted some fun."

William Stark fell back in his chair and began to laugh, round upon
wheezy round. When his glasses had fallen off and his cheeks were wet
and his face flamed painfully, Madam Fulton spoke, without a glea