From these and all other troubles Bunny now had a way of swift escape, the Monastery. Nobody up there had troubles—or if they did, they didn’t load them onto him! “Make this your country club,” Annabelle had said; “come when you please and stay as long as you please. Our horses ought to be ridden, and our books ought to be read, and there’s a whole ocean—only watch out for the rip-tides!” So Bunny would run up to this beautiful playground; and sometimes Vee Tracy was there, and when she wasn’t she would turn up a few hours later—quite mysteriously. She was several years older than he, and in knowledge of the world older than he would be at a hundred. Nevertheless, she was a good playmate. It was her business to be young in both body and spirit—it was the way she earned her living, and she practiced the game all the time. She had to live hard, like an athlete in training, a pugilist before a battle. Who could tell what strange freak might next occur to the author of a novel, or to a “continuity man,” or a director dissatisfied with the progress of a melodrama? She would find herself tied upon a wild horse, or to a log in a saw-mill, or dragged by a rope at the end of a speed-boat, or climbing a church steeple on the outside. In ages past, in lands barbarian and civilized, the hardships of the ascetic life have been imposed upon women for many strange reasons; but was there ever one more freakish than this—that she might appear before the eyes of millions in the aspect of a terror-stricken virgin tearing herself from the hands of lustful ravishers! Anyway, here she was, a playmate for a young idealist running away from other people’s troubles. They would take Annabelle’s unused horses, and ride them bareback over the hills to the beach, and gallop them into the surf and swim them there, to the great perplexity of the seals; or they would turn the horses loose, and run foot-races, and turn hand-springs and cart-wheels—Vee would go, a whirlwind of flying white limbs and flying black hair, all the way into the water, and the waves would be no wilder than her laughter. Then they would sit, basking in the sun, and she would tell him stories about Hollywood—and assuredly the waves were no wilder than these. Anything might happen in Hollywood, and in fact had happened—and Vee knew the people it had happened to.