"It is too touching for words, Bab!" she said. "It has broken my heart. I can just close my eyes and see the theater dark, and the stage almost dark, and just those bubbles coming up and breaking. Would you have to have a tank?" "I daresay," I replied dreamily. "Let the other people worry about that. I can only give them the material, and hope that they have intelligence enough to grasp it." I think Sis must have told Carter Brooks something about the trouble I was in, for he brought me a box of candy one afternoon, and winked at me when mother was not looking. "Don't open it here," he whispered. So I was forced to control my impatience, though passionately fond of candy. And when I got to my room later, the box was full of cigarettes. I could have screamed. It just gave me one more thing to hide, as if a man's suit and shirt and so on was not sufficient. But Carter paid more attention to me than he ever had before, and at a tea dance somebody had at the country club he took me to one side and gave me a good talking to. "You're being rather a bad child, aren't you?" he said. "Certainly not." "Well, not bad, but--er--naughty. Now see here, Bab, I'm fond of you, and you're growing into a mighty pretty girl. But your whole social life is at stake. For heaven's sake, at least until you're married, cut out the cigarettes and booze." That cut me to the heart, but what could I say? Well, July came, and we had rented a house at Little Hampton and everywhere one went one fell over an open trunk or a barrel containing silver or linen. Mother went around with her lips moving as if in prayer, but she was really repeating lists, such as sowing basket, table candles, headache tablets, black silk stockings and tennis rackets. Sis got some lovely clothes, mostly imported, but they had a woman come in and sew for me. Hannah and she used to interrupt my most precious moments at my desk by running a tape measure around me, or pinning a paper pattern to me. The sewing woman always had her mouth full of pins, and once, owing to my remarking that I wished I had been illegitimate, so I could go away and live my own life, she swallowed one. It caused a grate deal of excitement, with Hannah blaming me and giving her vinegar to swallow to soften the pin. Well, it turned out all right, for she kept on living, but she pretended to have sharp pains all over her here and there, and if the pin had been as lively as a tadpole and wriggled from spot to spot, it could not have hurt in so many places. Of course they blamed me, and I shut myself up more and more in my sanctuary. There I lived with the creatures of my dreams, and forgot for a while that I was only a Sub-Deb, and that Leila's last year's tennis clothes were being fixed over for me. But how true what dear Shakespeare says:= `````dreams, ```Which are the children of an idle brain. ```Begot of nothing but vain fantasy.=