Produced by Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team. HTML version by Al Haines. WHO CARES? A STORY OF ADOLESCENCE by COSMO HAMILTON TO MY YOUNG BROTHER ARTHUR WHO PLAYS THE GAME "Another new novel?" "Well,--another novel." "What's it about?" "A boy and a girl." "A love story?" "Well,--it's about a boy and a girl." "Do they marry?" "I said it was about a boy and a girl." "And are they happy?" "Well,--it's a love story." "But all love stories aren't happy!" "Yes they are,--if it's love." CONTENTS PART ONE SPRING IN THE WORLD PART TWO THE ROUND-ABOUT PART THREE THE GREAT EMOTION PART FOUR THE PAYMENT PART ONE SPRING IN THE WORLD AND ALL THINGS FOR THE YOUNG I Birds called. Breezes played among branches just bursting into green. Daffodils, proud and erect, stood in clumps about the dazzling lawn. Young, pulsing, eager things elbowed their way through last year's leaves to taste the morning sun; the wide-eyed celandine, yellower than butter; the little violet, hugging the earth for fear of being seen; the sturdy bourgeois daisy; the pale-faced anemone, earliest to wake and earliest to sleep; the blue bird's-eye in small family groups; the blatant dandelion already a head and shoulders taller than any neighbor. Every twig in the old garden bore its new load of buds that were soft as kittens' paws; and up the wrinkled trunks of ancient trees young ivy leaves chased each other like school-boys. Spring had come again, and its eternal spirit spread the message of new-born hope, stirred the sap of awakening life, warmed the bosom of a wintry earth and put into the hearts of birds the old desire to mate. But the lonely girl turned a deaf ear to the call, and rounded her shoulders over the elderly desk with tears blistering her letter. "I'm miserable, miserable," she wrote. "There doesn't seem to be anything to live for. I suppose it's selfish and horrid to grumble because Mother has married again, but why did she choose the very moment when she was to take me into life? Oh, Alice, what am I to do? I feel like a rabbit with its foot in a trap, listening to the traffic on the main road--like a newly fledged bird brought down with a broken wing among the dead leaves of Rip Van Winkle's sleeping-place. You'll laugh when you read this, and say that I'm dramatizing my feelings and writing for effect; but if you've got any heart at all, you'd cry if you saw me (me of all girls!) buried alive out here without a single soul to speak to who's as young as I am--hushed if I laugh by mistake, scowled at if I let myself move quickly, catching old age every hour I stay here."