"How I used to write them--if the characters were taken from life. I said every time." "Florrie, what a pirate you are!" "Then his eyes sharpened up like knives, and he wanted to know about the originals. 'Dead,' I said, 'years and years ago.'" "You didn't use to be a freebooter, Florrie. You were just a bright girl." "Of course I didn't. I was walking Spanish then. I was on my promotion. I always had faith life would do something for me if I'd speak pretty and hold out my tier. I held my tier a great many years and nothing dropped into it. I'm an awful example, Billy, of what a woman can become when she's had no fun. This may seem to you insanity. It isn't. It's the abnormal and monstrous fruit of a plant that wasn't allowed to mature at the right time. I am a mammoth squash." "What did you tell him about your novels?" "I told him they weren't written. They wrote themselves. My characters simply got away from me and did things I never dreamed of. I said they were more alive to me than people of flesh and blood." "Do you suppose he put in all that?" "I know he did." "Have you seen the paper?" "No." "Why not?" "I haven't dared to look." Billy Stark glanced at the floor as if he wanted to get down and roll. Then he lay back in his chair and went gasping off. Madam Fulton watched him seriously, that unquenchable spark still in her eyes. "I don't know what you can do next," said Billy, getting out his pocket-handkerchief, "unless you become engaged to me." Madam Fulton laid down her tatting, to look at him in a gentle musing. "It would plague Electra," she owned. "Come on, Florrie, come on! Get up early to-morrow morning, and we'll post off and be married." "No," said Madam Fulton absently, still considering, "I don't want to be married. Harsh measures never did attract me. But I'd like very well to be engaged. Tell you what, Billy, we could be engaged for the summer, and when you go back to England we'll call it off." Billy rose, and possessed himself of one of her hands. He kissed it ceremoniously, and returned it to its tatting. "You do me infinite honor," he announced, with more gravity than she liked. "Don't get too serious, Billy," she said quickly. "It'll remind us of being young, and mercy knows that isn't what we want." "May I inform your granddaughter?" asked the gentleman gravely. "No, no, I'll do it. That's half the fun." At that moment Electra came in. She was dressed in white, as usual, but her ordinary dignified simplicity seemed overlaid, to the old lady's satirical gaze, with an added smoothness of glossy surfaces. Her dress fell in simple folds. She seemed to have clothed herself to meet a moral emergency. Her face was pale in its determination. She was like a New England maiden led to sacrifice and bound, at all hazards, to do her conscience credit. Madam Fulton, seeing her, hardened her heart. There were few pirouettes she would not have essayed at that moment to plague her granddaughter.