"Most of them? Every one! I hadn't any letters from celebrities. Days when I might have had, I didn't care a button about the eggs they were cackling over, and I didn't know they were going to be celebrities, then, did I?" "Do you mean the recollections of Brook Farm, taken down from the lips of the old poet as he had it from a member of the fraternity there--" "Faked, dear boy, faked, every one of them." She was gathering cheerfulness by the way. "The story of Hawthorne and the first edition--" "Hypothetical. Grouse in the gun-room." "Do you mean that the story of the old slave who came to your mother's door in Waltham, and the three abolitionists on their way to the meeting--" "Now what's the use, Billy Stark?" cried the old lady. "I told you it was a fake from beginning to end. So it is. So is every page of it. If I'd written my recollections as they were, the book would have been a pamphlet of twenty odd pages. It would have said I married a learned professor because I thought if I got into Cambridge society I should see life, and life was what I wanted. It would have gone on to say I found it death and nothing else, and when my husband died I spent all the money I could get trying to see life and I never saw it then. Who'd have printed that? Pretty recollections, I should say!" Mr. Stark was still musing, his eyes interrogating her. "It's really incredible, Florrie," he said at last. "Poor dear! you needed the money." "That wasn't it." "Then what was?" "I don't know." But immediately her face folded up into its smiling creases and she said, "I wanted some fun." William Stark fell back in his chair and began to laugh, round upon wheezy round. When his glasses had fallen off and his cheeks were wet and his face flamed painfully, Madam Fulton spoke, without a gleam. "You're a nice man, Billy Stark." "You wanted your little joke!" he repeated, subsiding and trumpeting into his handkerchief. "Well, you've had it, Florrie; you've had it." "I don't know that I have," she returned. "I had to enjoy it alone, and that kind of palled on me. When the first notices came, I used to lie awake from three o'clock on, to laugh. I used to go to the window when Electra was in the room, and make up faces, to let off steam and keep her from knowing. Then the letters kept coming, and clubs and things kept hounding me, and Electra was always at me. There she is now, with my grog. See me take it and pour it into the syringa." II Electra was crossing the veranda with her springing step, bearing a glass of beaten egg and milk on a little tray. Madam Fulton signed to her to place the tray on a table, evidently ready for such ministrations, and then presented her friend. Electra greeted him with a smile of bright acceptance. She knew his standing, and his air of worldly ease quite satisfied her. "May I bring you--?" she began, with a pretty grace. "I should like a glass of water," said Billy, "if you will be so good."