Produced by Suzanne Shell, Sankar Viswanathan, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net [Illustration: The so-called delicious, intangible joke] Molly Make-Believe By Eleanor Hallowell Abbott With Illustrations by Walter Tittle New York The Century Co. 1911 Copyright, 1910, by THE CENTURY CO. * * * * * TO MY SILENT PARTNER * * * * * LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS The so-called delicious, intangible joke _Frontispiece_ "Good enough!" he chuckled Every girl like Cornelia had to go South sometime between November and March An elderly dame A much-freckled messenger-boy appeared dragging an exceedingly obstreperous fox-terrier "Well I'll be hanged," growled Stanton, "if I'm going to be strung by any boy!" Some poor old worn-out story-writer "Maybe she is--'colored,'" he volunteered at last "Oh! Don't I look--gorgeous!" she stammered "What?" cried Stanton, plunging forward in his chair Cornelia's mother answered this time He unbuckled the straps of his suitcase and turned the cover backward on the floor "Are you a good boy?" she asked "It's only Carl," he said * * * * * MOLLY MAKE-BELIEVE I The morning was as dark and cold as city snow could make it--a dingy whirl at the window; a smoky gust through the fireplace; a shadow black as a bear's cave under the table. Nothing in all the cavernous room, loomed really warm or familiar except a glass of stale water, and a vapid, half-eaten grape-fruit. Packed into his pudgy pillows like a fragile piece of china instead of a human being Carl Stanton lay and cursed the brutal Northern winter. Between his sturdy, restive shoulders the rheumatism snarled and clawed like some utterly frenzied animal trying to gnaw-gnaw-gnaw its way out. Along the tortured hollow of his back a red-hot plaster fumed and mulled and sucked at the pain like a hideously poisoned fang trying to gnaw-gnaw-gnaw its way in. Worse than this; every four or five minutes an agony as miserably comic as a crashing blow on one's crazy bone went jarring and shuddering through his whole abnormally vibrant system. In Stanton's swollen fingers Cornelia's large, crisp letter rustled not softly like a lady's skirts but bleakly as an ice-storm in December woods. Cornelia's whole angular handwriting, in fact, was not at all unlike a thicket of twigs stripped from root to branch of every possible softening leaf.