Yet this vision of Anne helped rather than hindered the dictation of the lines of his play. That her permeation of his thoughts did not get in the way of his developing the imaginary people whom his brain was moving about like puppets, said as nothing else could say how one with him she was, how completely, how selflessly she answered to his need. Richard Latham was writing a play. It was both comedy and tragedy, as most real dramas are; it was realism, yet idealized as are all lives which are worth living. It was that day reaching the end of its second act. No one but Anne Dallas had yet heard a line of it. She took it from Richard’s lips as it formed in his poet’s mind, feeling that she was a part of something unspeakably great; it gave her at once a sense of utter isolation and at the same time a feeling that she was in the midst of crowding splendours which lay beyond the bounds of daily events and their actors. Anne wondered while she waited for Richard to think out something that he wanted to express exactly, why it was she to whom this experience had fallen. Anne Dallas had not an undue opinion of Anne Dallas. She considered herself one of the majority of average people, not exceeding in face, mind, nor any way, hosts of girls correctly, but tamely, described as “nice girls.” Yet it was she and none of the others who was taking down this play to-day, these words and pictures and characters so beautiful that she felt sure that they would live on long after she had grown old and died. It was after three, and the rule was that work stopped at three, but Richard was dictating the last lines of the second act. It was tense with emotion, complex in situation, and many of the loveliest lines so far in the play were in this scene. It had not occurred to the workers to think of time. Anne Dallas looked up and saw little Anne Berkley coming up the walk. Her table was beside the window, and she signalled to the child to be quiet. Little Anne at once dropped down on the steps and began to fan herself with her hat, for she understood the ways of the poet from past experience, and knew that she must wait to be admitted. At last Richard Latham triumphantly cried: “Curtain!” and fell back in his chair, suddenly realizing that he was tired. “Will it do, Miss Dallas? Could you judge it as you wrote it?” Richard asked. “Oh, no, not judge it! It does far too well. I could not judge it. It is supremely fine and beautiful; it sweeps one along with it, but I know that it is the best thing that you have done,” cried Anne. “I don’t know; I’m afraid it isn’t much good,” said Richard, despondently. “Oh, Lord! To feel something surging against your brain, your lips, almost as if it literally pushed your ribs out, then to be tongue-tied, to feel you’ve played it false when it wanted to be born of you, that you’ve strangled it at birth, or brought it forth deformed!”