"Why no, Billy, of course I can't. I"--she held his glance with a mixture of deprecation and a gay delight--"I made them up." William Stark, the publisher, looked at her with round blue eyes growing rounder and a deeper red surging into his sea-tanned face. He seemed on the point of bursting into an explosion, whether of horror or mirth Madam Fulton could not tell. She continued to gaze at him in the same mingling of deprecating and amused inquiry. In spite of her years she looked like a little animal which, having done wrong, seeks out means of propitiation, and as yet knows nothing better than the lifted eyebrow of inquiry. "Well," she said again defiantly, "I made them up." "In God's name, Florrie, what for?" "I wanted to." "To pad out your book?" "To make a nice book, the kind of one I wanted. I'll tell you what, Billy,"--she bowled caution into the farthest distance,--"I'm going to make a clean breast of it. Now you won't peach?" He shook his head. "Go on," he bade her. She lifted her head, sat straighter in her chair, and spoke with firmness:-- "Now, Billy, if I'm going to talk to you at all, you must know precisely where I stand. Maybe you do, but I don't believe it. You see, all these years I've been writing what I called novels, and they've paid me a little, and I've got up a sort of local fame. I'm as poor--well, I can't tell you how poor. Only I live here in the summer with Electra in her house--" "It's the old Fulton house." "Yes, but it came to her through her father. Remember, I was a second wife. I had no children. My husband gave me the Cambridge place and left this to his son." "What became of the Cambridge house?" "Sold, years ago. Eaten up. Seems as if I'd done nothing, all these years, but eat. It makes me sick to think of it. Well, here was I, credit low, my little knack at writing all but gone--why, Billy, styles have changed since my day. Folks would hoot at my novels now. They don't read them. They just remember I wrote them when they want a celebrity at a tea. I'm a back number. Don't you know it?" He nodded, gravely pondering. The one thing about him never to be affected by his whimsical humor was the integrity of a business verdict. Madam Fulton now was warming to the value of her own position. She began to see how picturesque it was. "Well, then up rises one of your precious publishers and says to me, 'Mrs. Fulton, you have known all the celebrated people. Why not write your recollections?' 'Why not?' says I. Well, I went home and sat down and wrote. And when I looked back at my life, I found it dull. So I gave myself a free hand. I described the miserable thing as it ought to have been, not as it was." William Stark was leaning forward, looking her in the face, his hands on his knees, as if to steady him through an amazing crisis. "Florrie," he began, "do you mean to say you made up most of the letters in that book?"