I shall not attempt to tell you what your art means to me, and how you make other men seem, and I fear they always will seem like they was pigmies beside you. I take the great liberty of inclosing my own picture in case it would interest you to see what a great admirer of yours looks like. Being merely a rough draft, it was unsigned. Of all the possibilities that crossed Mrs. Hazlitt's mind on reading this document, the possibility that her daughter had not written it was not one. Several suspicious circumstances at once popped into her head--Lita's insistence on going to Valentine's play; her admiration of him; her tentative suggestion about marriage; her alternate high spirits and abstraction. "And who was he?" Margaret went on. "That young fellar brought her home yesterday?" "A man brought her home yesterday?" "Yes--the two of them in a taxi." "What did he look like?" "I couldn't see him very good; but I heard him say 'Until Sunday' as he got back into the taxi; and when I opened the door for Miss Lita you could see she was smiling all over her face, but not letting it out." Ah, how well, in other days, Mrs. Hazlitt had known that beatific state! She walked to her door and called, "Lita! Lita!" Probably if one read the memoirs of Napoleon, the dispatches of Wellington and the commentaries of Cæsar one would find a place where the author asserts that the best general is he who takes quickest advantage of chance. Lita, entering her mother's room with her head bent over a fastening of her dress, was wondering what made some fasteners cling like leeches and others droop apart like limp handshakes. For the first few minutes she had no idea what her mother was talking about. She was prepared to feel guilty--she was guilty, but she had written no letter. "Writing a letter like that--a vulgar letter--and making me take you to his play--and coming home with him, when I was actually waiting at the gate for you. Perhaps you were not even on that train at all--so terribly deceitful--as if I were your enemy instead of your mother. I felt there was something queer about you at the play! An actor! I wish you knew something about actors in private life. And Valentine of all people! A man--" Mrs. Hazlitt paused. She knew nothing about Valentine's private life; but she thought it was pretty safe to make that pause as if it were all too awful to discuss. "Your father must be told of this. It will shock him very much." That was the phrase that gave Lita her great idea. Not since she was four years old had she heard the words "your father" spoken in that tone. Perhaps after all, it was not necessary to die in order to reconcile your parents; perhaps it was enough to let them think you were undesirably in love. She had a moment to consider this notion while her mother, in a short frilled petticoat, with her blond hair about her shoulders, was running on about what Mr. Hazlitt would say to this man.