around your own door-step? Horrible! Listen to
this!" said he, accusingly:

"Fair lady, on that snowy neck and half-clad bosom
Which you so publicly reveal to man,
There's not a single outward stain or speck.
Would that you had given but half the care
To the training of your intellect and heart,
As you have given to that spotless neck!"

"Gracious Heavens!" gasped Miss Martha, who showed a modest
salt-cellar in the mildest of Vs.

"Is it possible you don't like him?" demanded The Author, amazedly.
"But, my dear woman! Coogler's--why, Coogler's ginger-pop to a
thirsty world!"

"I--I don't drink ginger-pop!" confessed the be-deviled Center of
Culture, foggily.

"Alas! for the South, her books have grown fewer,
She never was much given to literature,"

quoted The Author, pensively.

She was speechless. The shameless Author, fixing upon her a last
long, lingering look of sorrowful reproach, said with emotion:

"From early youth to the frost of age
Man's days have been a mixture
Of all that constitutes in life
A dark and gloomy picture."

And he stalked off, leaving Miss Martha Hopkins in a state of mind.

"Friend Author," Alicia murmured, as he paused beside her, "I wish
you were my own dear little boy for just five merry minutes. I'd
show you," she declared, divided between Irish mirth and human pity
for Miss Martha, "I'd show you what a hair-brush could accomplish!"

"Too late!" regretted The Author, shaking his head. "But," he
suggested, brightening, "couldn't you wish to be my own dear little
girl, instead?"

"This is so sudden!" murmured Alicia, coyly.

"Deluding devilette!" breathed The Author, "get thee behind me!"

That evening was the first time I had ever heard myself called
"pretty." I was used to "businesslike" and "efficient" and
"trustworthy"--all excellent terms, in their way, but not such happy
things, any one of them, as "pretty."

"What are you thinking of, Sophy?" asked The Author. "Something over
the hills and far away? Because you look as Maude Adams used to look
when she first played 'Peter Pan.'"

I hoped it might be true, because--

I looked up then and met Mr. Nicholas Jelnik's dark eyes. They were
falcon eyes, but now there was something in them that made me, to my
rage and confusion and chagrin, blush like a silly school-girl. When
I again venture