"She writes to you?" asked Peter in a good deal of surprise. "You mean she always has written to you?" "Oh no, I never heard from her at all till during the war. It must have been a couple of years ago. Of course even when I was a kid I'd heard a little about her. You remember old Kate. Well, a long time ago she told me that my mother was an actress and a very bad woman and that I mustn't say anything about her to you. I don't believe I ever did, did I?" "Kate had no right to say that. Your mother isn't a bad woman. She's a great artist." "Well, I guess I never worried much about it anyway. Maybe I was a little sad about it at first, but I've forgotten. And then all of sudden I got this letter from Maria Algarez. She said she'd seen you in Paris and that you showed her my picture and she wanted to write to me. She told me all about her singing. After that I got a lot of letters from her. She'd say she'd just been singing in 'Butterfly' and then she'd tell me what it was all about. You know that funny broken way she has of writing things." "Yes," said Peter, "I know." "Well, it was a lot of fun. You see I'd never heard any of these operas but after I found out about Maria Algarez singing in them I used to go. If she wrote that she'd been singing 'Butterfly' I'd go to the Met and get a standup seat and then I'd write to her and tell her about Farrar and all the people I'd heard. She'd write back and tell me all the things that were the matter with Farrar and the way she did it differently and a lot better." "She never showed any of those letters to me," said Peter. "Didn't she?" asked Pat casually as if it made no difference. "Oh yes, I remember she wrote to me once that if I told you about going to the opera it might worry you and not to say anything about it. I don't know why. She used to send me clippings from the newspapers with the things critics said about her. They were all just crazy about her." Peter in his bitterness was about to say, "Of course, she picked out the good ones," but Pat was in full swing and he decided not to throw him off his stride. "You know I couldn't read this stuff at first. It was in French and Spanish, but there was an old fellow that taught at school and he was terribly excited too when I told him that Maria Algarez was sending me these clippings. He'd heard her sing, you know. He used to translate the clippings for me and he told me a lot about Maria Algarez." "And now," said Peter, "I suppose you can read them yourself." "Well, I can do the French all right but I'm not much on the Spanish. You see the old Frenchman, the fellow that taught at school, he was awful decent to me. He used to give me extra classes outside of school. You see we had a secret between us. It was like belonging to that kid fraternity we used to have in high school--Alpha Kappa Phi. That means something that nobody else knew. I can't remember what." "Brothers and friends," prompted Peter. "How did you know that?"