_Long Island._ _At a Beautiful House_ _Where We Are Guests._ MIGNONNE: You cannot figure to yourself how the life is wonderful, just after one has thought, "Crack! the sky tumbles!" But yes, you can figure it, because of your adventure at Easter. I am almost too happy. I live in a story of fairies, and I ask myself, is it too good to last? You know, cherie, how I loved always to read the books of romance, when we could hide them from our kind Sisters, who think it wrong for the young girls to fill their heads with such thoughts till after the marriage. Since I have left the dear convent, I have read earnestly in journals the writings of critics who live by having opinions about other people. I see by them that romance is not truth. It is only the dull things which are real. Yet for you and me, life is now running like the stories at which these critics laugh the most. That is why I ask myself, "Can such things go on?" For it seems that critics must know better than me (or should I say "I?"). Perhaps they have reason. Perhaps we shall end in a monotony of grayness like the books these wise men and women praise for "the realism." Or we shall fall down, down, in tragedy?--for that, it seems, can also be true to life; only just the _happy_ things are not true. Yet at present let us live joyously for a little while as in one of those dear books we read in secret at school: books of romance and even of mystery.