w wrote: "A Day at
School", and conscientiously set down detail on detail; so fearful,
this time, of over-brevity, that she spun the account out to twenty
pages; though the writing of it was as distasteful to her as her
reading of A DOLL'S HOUSE had been.

At the subsequent meeting of the Society, expression of opinion was not
lacking.

"Oh, Jehoshaphat! How much more?"

"Here, let me get out. I've had enough."

"I say, you forgot to count how many steps it took you to come
downstairs."

Till the chairman had pity on the embarrassed author and said: "Look
here, Laura, I think you'd better keep the rest for another time."

"It was just what you told me to do," Laura reproached Cupid that
night: she was on the brink of tears.

But Cupid was disinclined to shoulder the responsibility. "Told you to
be as dull and long-winded as that? Infant, it's a whacker!"

"But it was TRUE what I wrote--every word of it."

Neither of the two elder girls was prepared to discuss this vital
point. Cupid shifted ground. "Good Lord, Laura, but it's hard to drive
a thing into YOUR brain-pan.--You don't need to be ALL true on paper,
silly child!"

"Last time you said I had to."

"Well, if you want it, my candid opinion is that you haven't any talent
for this kind of thing.--Now turn off the gas."

As the light in the room went out, a kind of inner light seemed to go
up in Laura; and both then and on the following days she thought hard.
She was very ambitious, anxious to shine, not ready to accept defeat;
and to the next literary contest she brought the description of an
excursion to the hills and gullies that surrounded Warrenega; into
which she had worked an adventure with some vagrant blacks. She and Pin
and the boys had often picnicked on these hills, with their lunches
packed in billies; and she had seen the caves and rocky holes where
blackfellows were said to have hidden themselves in early times; but
neither this particular excursion, nor the exciting incident which she
described with all the aplomb of an eyewitness, had ever taken place.
That is to say: not a word of her narration was true, but every word of
it might have been true.

And with this she had an unqualified success.

"I believe there's something in you after all," said Cupid to her that
night. "Anyhow, you know now what it is to be true, yet not dull and
prosy."

And Laura manfully choked back her desire to cry out that not a word of
her story was fact.