As we turned into Main Street a big automobile was leaving the post-office. Mr. Black and his nice little wife—new people who are summering here—were in the tonneau. I hardly know how it came about, but in what seemed the twinkling of an eye Ellinor and I were in it, too. I did not understand where it was we were going, and when I tried to find out I swallowed so many buckets of air that I gave it up. But it was not of the slightest importance. All that had ever happened to me was of slight importance. I was having my first automobile ride. We seemed to winnow the air like birds: to dip and dart down and around the curves, to soar up the hills with the flash and swiftness of wings. A dozen miles from our village we raced up a stately avenue and ran under a _porte-cochère_—our flight at end. The lady who came out to greet us was surrounded by dogs, big and little, aristocratic and plebeian, handsome and hideous. After greeting her, Mrs. Black drew me forward and said: “Edna, this is Caroline Howard, who adores every word you write. Edna is my sister, Miss Howard.” I draw a long breath of happiness at thought of yesterday. I live it all over again. I feel sure it was no ordinary spark of liking that leaped between Edna Kennedy and me instantaneously and spontaneously. We had luncheon yesterday on a big wide veranda that overlooks a winding ribbon of a river from the view we had of it as calm and still as if frozen. After luncheon there was music: Geraldine Farrar in “Madam Butterfly”—and the story unfolded before me. I felt the anguish of that poor little waiting and trusting and praying wife. Tetrazzini in the mad scene from “Lucia,” and the flutelike voice going high and high and higher, till I bent forward in breathless suspense to drop back in my chair in content at that last marvellously dizzyingly high sweet bird note. Moved by a little burst of confidence I could not control, I told Edna Kennedy that I had never heard grand opera; that I had never been anywhere or seen anything. And then I told her of the thrilly little waves running up and down me that were fairly shouting it was the beginning and not the end of beautiful happenings to me—just as though I had walked through a wood and come to a beautiful palace, and only stepped up on the portico with my hand still on the doorknob. I told her about Robert Haralson, too: what friends we were when I was little, before we came to live in the mountains. I was dreadfully disappointed that she does not know him. She says few people know him. She says he is shy; that he lives in his work—that the first night of the big play that is making him so rich and famous he ran away from the theatre afraid of the call that authors get to come before the curtain. As we were leaving, Edna Kennedy gathered some magazines from the library table and gave them to me. “He is in them all,” she said. “Nobody in the literary and dramatic world is more in the public eye.”