It was as well, for, as the literature teacher told the doctor afterward, it was one notch above her experience, and she absolutely could have found no word to say. When the Wife came back to the hammock, ten minutes later, the cloud was gone from her face, and she never mentioned the subject again. And you may be sure that the literature teacher never did. She always looked upon the incident as her worst moment of tactlessness. * * * * * "Bully, bully!" exclaimed the Lawyer, "Take off your laurels, Critic, and crown the Doctor!" "For that little tale," shouted the Critic. "Never! That has not a bit of literary merit. It has not one rounded period." "The Lawyer is a realist," said the Sculptor. "Of course that appeals to him." "If you want my opinion, I consider that there is just as much imagination in that story as in the morbid rigmarole you threw at us last night," persisted the Lawyer. "Why," declared the Critic, "I call mine a healthy story compared with this one. It is a shocking tale for the operating room--I mean the insane asylum." "All right," laughed the Doctor, "then we had all better go inside the sanitarium walls at once." "Do you presume," said the Journalist, "to pretend that this is a normal incident?" "I am not going into that. I only claim that more people know the condition than dare to confess it. It is after all only symbolic of the duality of the soul--or call it what you like. It is the embodiment of a truth which no one thinks of denying--that the spirit has its secrets. Imagination plays a great part in most of our lives--it is the glory that gilds our facts--it is the brilliant barrier which separates us from the beasts, and the only real thing that divides us into classes, though, of course, it does not run through the world like straight lines of latitude and longitude, but like the lines of mean temperature." "The truth is," said the Lawyer, "if the Principal Girl had been obliged to struggle for her living, the fact that her imagination did not run at any point into her world of realities would not have been dangerous." "Naturally not," said the Doctor, "for she would have been a great novelist, or a poor one, and all would have been well, or not, according to circumstances." "All the same," persisted the Critic, "I think it a horrid story and--" "I think," interrupted the Doctor, "that you have a vicious mind, and--" Here the Doctor cast a quick look in the direction of the Youngster, who was stretched out in a steamer chair and had not said a word. "All right," said the Trained Nurse, "he is fast asleep." And so he was. "Just as well," said the Doctor, "though it does not speak so well for the story as it might." "Well," laughed the Journalist, "you have had a double success, Doctor. You have been spontaneously applauded by the man of law, and sent the man of the air to _faire dodo_. I reckon you get the laurels."