"Hello!" She smiled up at him wanly. "Horace, there's something I want you to do. Look in my top bureau drawer and you'll find a big stack of paper. It's a book--sort of--Horace. I wrote it down in these last three months while I've been laid up. I wish you'd take it to that Peter Boyce Wendell who put my letter in his paper. He could tell you whether it'd be a good book. I wrote it just the way I talk, just the way I wrote that letter to him. It's just a story about a lot of things that happened to me. Will you take it to him, Horace?" "Yes, darling." He leaned over the bed until his head was beside her on the pillow, and began stroking back her yellow hair. "Dearest Marcia," he said softly. "No," she murmured, "call me what I told you to call me." "Dear heart," he whispered passionately--"dearest heart." "What'll we call her?" They rested a minute in happy, drowsy content, while Horace considered. "We'll call her Marcia Hume Tarbox," he said at length. "Why the Hume?" "Because he's the fellow who first introduced us." "That so?" she murmured, sleepily surprised. "I thought his name was Moon." Her eyes dosed, and after a moment the slow lengthening surge of the bedclothes over her breast showed that she was asleep. Horace tiptoed over to the bureau and opening the top drawer found a heap of closely scrawled, lead-smeared pages. He looked at the first sheet: SANDRA PEPYS, SYNCOPATED BY MARCIA TARBOX He smiled. So Samuel Pepys had made an impression on her after all. He turned a page and began to read. His smile deepened--he read on. Half an hour passed and he became aware that Marcia had waked and was watching him from the bed. "Honey," came in a whisper. "What Marcia?" "Do you like it?" Horace coughed. "I seem to be reading on. It's bright." "Take it to Peter Boyce Wendell. Tell him you got the highest marks in Princeton once and that you ought to know when a book's good. Tell him this one's a world beater." "All right, Marcia," Horace said gently. Her eyes closed again and Horace crossing over kissed her forehead--stood there for a moment with a look of tender pity. Then he left the room. All that night the sprawly writing on the pages, the constant mistakes in spelling and grammar, and the weird punctuation danced before his eyes. He woke several times in the night, each time full of a welling chaotic sympathy for this desire of Marcia's soul to express itself in words. To him there was something infinitely pathetic about it, and for the first time in months he began to turn over in his mind his own half-forgotten dreams. He had meant to write a series of books, to popularize the new realism as Schopenhauer had popularized pessimism and William James pragmatism. But life hadn't come that way. Life took hold of people and forced them into flying rings. He laughed to think of that rap at his door, the diaphanous shadow in Hume, Marcia's threatened kiss.