s for the back yard, the sitting-room radiator, or the side porch
(depending on her place of residence, and the time of year).

Mary Louise was seized with the feeling at ten o'clock on a joyous June
morning. She tried to fight it off because she had got to that stage in
the construction of her story where her hero was beginning to talk and
act a little more like a real live man, and a little less like a clothing
store dummy. (By the way, they don't seem to be using those
pink-and-white, black-mustachioed figures any more. Another good simile
gone.)

Mary Louise had been battling with that hero for a week. He wouldn't
make love to the heroine. In vain had Mary Louise striven to instill red
blood into his watery veins. He and the beauteous heroine were as far
apart as they had been on Page One of the typewritten manuscript. Mary
Louise was developing nerves over him. She had bitten her finger nails,
and twisted her hair into corkscrews over him. She had risen every
morning at the chaste hour of seven, breakfasted hurriedly, tidied the
tiny two-room apartment, and sat down in the unromantic morning light to
wrestle with her stick of a hero. She had made her heroine a creature of
grace, wit, and loveliness, but thus far the hero had not once clasped
her to him fiercely, or pressed his lips to her hair, her eyes, her
cheeks. Nay (as the story-writers would put it), he hadn't even devoured
her with his gaze.

This morning, however, he had begun to show some signs of life. He was
developing possibilities. Whereupon, at this critical stage in the
story-writing game, the hair-washing mania seized Mary Louise. She tried
to dismiss the idea. She pushed it out of her mind, and slammed the
door. It only popped in again. Her fingers wandered to her hair. Her
eyes wandered to the June sunshine outside. The hero was left poised,
arms outstretched, and unquenchable love-light burning in his eyes, while
Mary Louise mused, thus:

"It certainly feels sticky. It's been six weeks, at least. And I could
sit here-by the window--in the sun--and dry it----"

With a jerk she brought her straying fingers away from her hair, and her
wandering eyes away from the sunshine, and her runaway thoughts back to
the typewritten page. For three minutes the snap of the little disks
crackled through the stillness of the tiny apartment. Then, suddenly, as
though succumbing to an irresistible force, Mary Louise rose, walked
across th