He waited, panting softly, his lips apart. This was to be the first time he had ever seen Nelly’s room. She opened the door part way, smiling shyly, timidly, holding her pale-blue dressing-gown close. The pale blueness was a modestly brilliant spot against the whiteness of the room—white bureau, hung with dance programs and a yellow Upton’s Grove High School banner, white tiny rocker, pale-yellow matting, white-and-silver wall-paper, and a glimpse of a white soft bed. He was dizzy with the exaltation of that purity, but he got himself to say: “I’m kind of stuck on the first part of the play, Miss Nelly. Please tell me how you think the heroine would speak to her dad. Would she call him ‘papa’ or ‘sir,’ do you think?” “Why—let me see—” “They’re such awful high society—” “Yes, that’s so. Why, I should think she’d say ‘sir.’ Maybe oh, what was it I heard in a play at the Academy of Music? ‘Father, I have come back to you!’” “Sa-a-ay, that’s a fine line! That’ll get the crowd going right from the first…. I _told_ you you’d help me a lot.” “I’m awfully glad if I _have_ helped you,” she said, earnestly. Good night—and good, “awfully glad, but luck with the play. Good night.” “Good night. Thank you a lot, Miss Nelly. Church in the morning, remember! Good night.” “Good night.” As it is well known that all playwrights labor with toy theaters before them for working models, Mr. Wrenn ran to earth a fine unbroken pasteboard box in which a ninety-eight-cent alarm-clock had recently arrived. He went out for some glue and three small corks. Setting up his box stage, he glued a pill-box and a match-box on the floor—the side of the box it had always been till now—and there he had the mahogany desks. He thrust three matches into the corks, and behold three graceful actors—graceful for corks, at least. There was fascination in having them enter, through holes punched in the back of the box, frisk up to their desks and deliver magic emotional speeches that would cause any audience to weep; speeches regarding which he knew everything but the words; a detail of which he was still quite ignorant after half an hour of playing with his marionettes. Before he went despairingly to bed that Saturday night he had added to his manuscript: _Mr. Thorne_ says: Here are the papers, sir. As a great railway president you should— The rest of that was to be filled in later. How the dickens could he let the public know how truly great his president was? (_Daughter, Miss Nelly, comes in._) _Miss Nelly:_ Father, I have come back to you, sir. _Mr. Warrington:_ My Daughter! _Nelly:_ Father, I have something to tell you; something—