"It's not a queer house!" the girl defied me. "It's--it's this house! And you can't say Money built this house! Money couldn't have done it! Not all the money in the world, couldn't! It wasn't Money! It was-- Pride! Not the sort of pride that goeth before _de_struction but that mightier pride that goeth before _con_struction! No, no!" she murmured vehemently, "it wasn't Money! It was really almost done before the money came! And she didn't just build the house over, she built all of us over. And built the whole world over for us all. Just with her pride in us! Just with the pride she made us feel in ourselves! And do you know, we were all such self-centered idiots, that it wasn't until after she was gone that we grasped what she'd done with us? We didn't know the glory and the wonder of her until after she was gone--" "She's not--?" The Sculptor Girl answered my half-asked question almost ferociously. "Of course she's not dead! She is the alivest person in this whole world--aliver than you or I can ever be! And yet,--we've lost her. She isn't just _ours_ any more. And when she was blessedly, absolutely just ours--we didn't appreciate her. You see, she was so frumpy and absurd and quiet we didn't think about her--we scarcely saw her. But oh--the minute when we did see her! It came in a flash for me! I just knew, all of a sudden, that she was perfectly beautiful--as beautiful as her own whistle--her lovely, lovely Mademoiselle Folly whistle--" "Oh! Oh!" I gasped, "_You can't mean that she was--is--Mademoiselle Folly?_" "Mean it? Didn't you know it? Didn't you ever hear her whistle? Oh, even now that she's gone it seems to me that I can still hear her whistling! And no matter what any one has said about it--they couldn't all of them, put together, say half enough--not even if they all said things as gushy as the Poetry Girl--she said it was like water trickling in a moonlit fountain! I only know it's like what I tried to put into my little Pandora--that it was like what Barrie was thinking when he let Peter Pan cry, 'I'm Joy! Joy! Joy!'--Even the Painter Boy, who has a silly pose that he hates music, used to hang around to hear her whistle--he pretended he was just looking at her so's he could paint her, but that didn't fool me--Listen, there's Nor' stumping up stairs now--he's awfully lame on these rainy days and _that_ moody--" "Do you mean Noralla? The one who did 'The Spirit of Romance'? Does he live here?" She nodded impishly. "And Thad, the cartoonist and Blythe Modder and--" she began reeling off a victorious list of young celebrities. "And that one little dressmaker discovered you all?" I asked, quite awestricken, "How could she? What sort of a wonder was she? How can you explain it?" The girl swung her lithe self up on the table, clasped her narrow hands about her knees and smiled benignly down upon me. She seemed naively content with herself, relaxed and quiet after her tempestuous storm of words.