"A tax on the memory and not on the imagination," retorted Warry. Miss Warren was asking Mr. Porter's opinion of local political conditions which were just then attracting wide-spread attention. Mr. Porter was expressing his distrust of a leader who had leaped into fame by a violent arraignment of the rich. "It wouldn't be so terribly hard for us all to get rich," said Warry. "I sometimes marvel at the squalor about us. All that a man need do is to concentrate his attention on one thing, and if he is capable of earning a dollar a day he can just as easily earn ten thousand a year. Why"--he continued earnestly, "I knew a fellow in Peoria, who devised a scheme for building duplicates of some of the architectural wonders of the Old World in American cities. His plan was to send out a million postal cards inviting a dollar apiece from a million people. Almost anybody can give away a dollar and not miss it." "How did the scheme work?" asked Mr. Porter. "It wasn't tested," answered Warry. "The doctors in the sanitarium wouldn't let him out long enough to mail his postal cards." General Whipple persuaded Miss Marshall to tell a negro story, which she did delightfully, while the table listened. Southerners are, after all, the most natural talkers we have and the only ones who can talk freely of themselves without offense. Her speech was musical, and she told her story with a nice sense of its dramatic quality. At the climax, after the laughter had abated, she asked, with an air of surprise at their pleasure in her tale: "Didn't you all ever hear that story before?" She was guiltless of final r's, and her drawl was delicious. "Oh, Miss Marshall! I _knew_ you'd say it!" Raridan appealed to the others to be sure of witnesses. "What are you all laughing at?" demanded the girl, flushing and smiling about her. "Oh, you did it twice!" "I _didn't_ say it, Mr. Raridan," she said, with dignity. "I never said that after I went North to school." "Well, Belle," said Evelyn, "I'm heartily ashamed of you. After all we did in college to break you of it, you are at it again though you've been only a few months away from us." "It's hopeless, I'm afraid," said Miss Warren. "You know, Evelyn, she said 'I-alls' when she first came to college." They had their coffee on the veranda, where the lights from within made a pleasant dusk about them. Porter's heart was warm with the joy of Evelyn's home-coming. She had been away from him so much that he was realizing for the first time the common experience of fathers, who find that their daughters have escaped suddenly and inexplicably from girlhood into womanhood; and yet the girl heart in her had not lost its freshness nor its thirst for pleasure. She had carried off her little company charmingly; Porter had enjoyed it himself, and he felt young again in the presence of youth.