Mrs. Baron glanced up from her book again when Bonnie May and Baggot passed through the room. She spoke to Baggot in the most casual manner. Bonnie May concluded that he must be a somewhat frequent visitor. Mrs. Baron was quite frank in her indifference to him. “I think you’ll find Victor in the library,” she said. She glanced pointedly at the manuscript in his hand and frowned. “And would you mind closing the door when you go in?” Mrs. Baron achieved her cruelties sometimes with such a naïve directness that they seemed to many people like a kind of high breeding. Baggot stepped gingerly into the next room, followed eagerly by Bonnie May. He was closing the door softly when Baron greeted him. “Hello, Baggot. Done something great again, of course?” “Yes, I have!” retorted Baggot angrily. He wouldn’t endure Baron’s bad manners, no matter how he might receive the bad manners of Baron’s mother. “You’re going to say so, too. I’ve got the first act finished. I’ve only got to fill in the scenario of the other acts, and I’ve got the greatest play that ever came out of America.” Baron smiled wearily. “And I’m to listen while you read the first act of the greatest play, etc.?” “Yes--and you’re to agree with me, too. I don’t see anything great in your sneering at me all the time!” He pulled up a chair and sat down so that his knees almost touched Baron’s. Obviously, they were a pair of young men on very intimate terms. Bonnie May slipped into a remote corner of the room and climbed into a big chair. Her hand supported her chin; her eyes were luminous. She did not mean to miss a word. And Baggot began to read. His face was almost tortured with nervous energy. He handled the pages as if they were in hopeless confusion, yet he brought order out of them swiftly. The reading proceeded ten minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour. Baggot read with profound confidence and belief. His staccato tones fairly hurled the words of the play at his auditors. Baron had put away his cynic attitude. He had become deeply impressed. He had even forgotten that it was his favorite pose not to seem deeply impressed by anything. Bonnie May was like one in a beautiful dream. She was not only listening to the play; she was living it. And then her dream was broken in a manner which filled her mind with almost blank astonishment. Mrs. Baron appeared in the doorway. “Bonnie May,” she announced, “I think it’s high time for a little girl to be in bed.” CHAPTER VI CONCERNING A FROCK It might have been, and should have been, apparent to the several members of the Baron household that Bonnie May had been giving an admirable exhibition of self-repression from the moment she had entered the house. A change came at last--when Mrs. Baron disturbed the reading of the play and announced, at nine o’clock, that it was “high time for a little girl to be in bed.”