Shrugging his shoulders as though to shrug aside absolutely any possible further responsibility concerning, "little brother," Stanton began to dig down deeper into the box. Then suddenly all the grin came back to his face.

"And here are some sample wall papers that she sent me for 'our house'," he confided, flushing. "What do you think of that bronze one there with the peac.o.c.k feathers?--say, old man, think of a library--and a cannel coal fire--and a big mahogany desk--and a red-haired girl sitting against that paper! And this sun-shiny tint for a breakfast-room isn't half bad, is it?--Oh yes, and here are the time-tables, and all the pink and blue maps about Colorado and Arizona and the 'Painted Desert'. If we can 'afford it,' she writes, she 'wishes we could go to the Painted Desert on our wedding trip.'--But really, old man, you know it isn't such a frightfully expensive journey. Why if you leave New York on Wednesday--Oh, hang it all!

What's the use of showing you any more of this nonsense?" he finished abruptly.

With brutal haste he started cramming everything back into place. "It is nothing but nonsense!" he acknowledged conscientiously; "nothing in the world except a boxful of make-believe thoughts from a make-believe girl. And here," he finished resolutely, "are my own fiancee's thoughts--concerning me."

Out of his blanket-wrapper pocket he produced and spread out before the Doctor's eyes five thin letters and a postal-card.

"Not exactly thoughts concerning _you_, even so, are they?" quizzed the Doctor.

Stanton began to grin again. "Well, thoughts concerning the weather, then--if that suits you any better."

Twice the Doctor swallowed audibly. Then, "But it's hardly fair--is it--to weigh a boxful of even the prettiest lies against five of even the slimmest real, true letters?" he asked drily.

"But they're not lies!" snapped Stanton. "Surely you don't call anything a lie unless not only the fact is false, but the fancy, also, is maliciously distorted! Now take this case right before us. Suppose there isn't any 'little brother' at all; suppose there isn't any 'Painted Desert', suppose there isn't any 'black sheep up on a grandfather's farm', suppose there isn't _anything_; suppose, I say, that every single, individual fact stated is _false_--what earthly difference does it make so long as the _fancy_ still remains the truest, realest, dearest, funniest thing that ever happened to a fellow in his life?"

"Oh, ho!" said the Doctor. "So that's the trouble is it! It isn't just rheumatism that's keeping you thin and worried looking, eh? It's only that you find yourself suddenly in the embarra.s.sing predicament of being engaged to one girl and--in love with another?"

"N--o!" cried Stanton frantically. "N--O! That's the mischief of it--the very mischief! I don't even know that the Serial-Letter Co.

_is_ a girl. Why it might be an old lady, rather whimsically inclined.

Even the oldest lady, I presume, might very reasonably perfume her note-paper with cinnamon roses. It might even be a boy. One letter indeed smelt very strongly of being a boy--and mighty good tobacco, too! And great heavens! what have I got to prove that it isn't even an old man--some poor old worn out story-writer trying to ease out the ragged end of his years?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: Some poor old worn-out story-writer]

"Have you told your fiancee about it?" asked the Doctor.

Stanton's jaw dropped. "Have I told my fiancee about it?" he mocked.

"Why it was she who sent me the circular in the first place! But, 'tell her about it'? Why, man, in ten thousand years, and then some, how could I make any sane person understand?"

"You're beginning to make me understand," confessed the Doctor.

"Then you're no longer sane," scoffed Stanton. "The crazy magic of it has surely then taken possession of you too. Why how could I go to any sane person like Cornelia--and Cornelia is the most absolutely, hopelessly sane person you ever saw in your life--how could I go to anyone like that, and announce: 'Cornelia, if you find any perplexing change in me during your absence--and your unconscious neglect--it is only that I have fallen quite madly in love with a person'--would you call it a person?--who doesn't even exist. Therefore for the sake of this 'person who doesn't exist', I ask to be released."

"Oh! So you do ask to be released?" interrupted the Doctor.

"Why, no! Certainly not!" insisted Stanton. "Suppose the girl you love does hurt your feelings a little bit now and then, would any man go ahead and give up a real flesh-and-blood sweetheart for the sake of even the most wonderful paper-and-ink girl whom he was reading about in an unfinished serial story? Would he, I say--would he?"

"Y-e-s," said the Doctor soberly. "Y-e-s, I think he would, if what you call the 'paper-and-ink girl' suggested suddenly an entirely new, undreamed-of vista of emotional and spiritual satisfaction."

"But I tell you 'she's' probably a BOY!" persisted Stanton doggedly.

"Well, why don't you go ahead and find out?" quizzed the Doctor.

"Find out?" cried Stanton hotly. "Find out? I'd like to know how anybody is going to find out, when the only given address is a private post-office box, and as far as I know there's no s.e.x to a post-office box. Find out? Why, man, that basket over there is full of my letters returned to me because I tried to 'find out'. The first time I asked, they answered me with just a teasing, snubbing telegram, but ever since then they've simply sent back my questions with a stern printed slip announcing, "Your letter of ---- is hereby returned to you.

Kindly allow us to call your attention to the fact that we are not running a correspondence bureau. Our circular distinctly states, etc."

"Sent you a printed slip?" cried the Doctor scoffingly. "The love-letter business must be thriving. Very evidently you are by no means the only importunate subscriber."

"Oh, Thunder!" growled Stanton. The idea seemed to be new to him and not altogether to his taste. Then suddenly his face began to brighten.

"No, I'm lying," he said. "No, they haven't always sent me a printed slip. It was only yesterday that they sent me a rather real sort of letter. You see," he explained, "I got pretty mad at last and I wrote them frankly and told them that I didn't give a darn who 'Molly' was, but simply wanted to know _what_ she was. I told them that it was just grat.i.tude on my part, the most formal, impersonal sort of grat.i.tude--a perfectly plausible desire to say 'thank you' to some one who had been awfully decent to me these past few weeks. I said right out that if 'she' was a boy, why we'd surely have to go fishing together in the spring, and if 'she' was an old man, the very least I could do would be to endow her with tobacco, and if 'she' was an old lady, why I'd simply be obliged to drop in now and then of a rainy evening and hold her knitting for her."

"And if 'she' were a girl?" probed the Doctor.

Stanton's mouth began to twitch. "Then Heaven help me!" he laughed.

"Well, what answer did you get?" persisted the Doctor. "What do you call a realish sort of letter?"

With palpable reluctance Stanton drew a gray envelope out of the cuff of his wrapper.

"I suppose you might as well see the whole business," he admitted consciously.

There was no special diffidence in the Doctor's manner this time. His clutch on the letter was distinctly inquisitive, and he read out the opening sentences with almost rhetorical effect.

"Oh, Carl dear, you silly boy, WHY do you persist in hectoring me so? Don't you understand that I've got only a certain amount of ingenuity anyway, and if you force me to use it all in trying to conceal my ident.i.ty from you, how much shall I possibly have left to devise schemes for your amus.e.m.e.nt? Why do you persist, for instance, in wanting to see my face? Maybe I haven't got any face! Maybe I lost my face in a railroad accident. How do you suppose it would make me feel, then, to have you keep teasing and teasing.--Oh, Carl!

"Isn't it enough for me just to tell you once for all that there is an insuperable obstacle in the way of our ever meeting. Maybe I've got a husband who is cruel to me. Maybe, biggest obstacle of all, I've got a husband whom I am utterly devoted to. Maybe, instead of any of these things, I'm a poor, old wizened-up, Shut-In, tossing day and night on a very small bed of very big pain. Maybe worse than being sick I'm starving poor, and maybe, worse than being sick or poor, I am most horribly tired of myself. Of course if you are very young and very prancy and reasonably good-looking, and still are tired of yourself, you can almost always rest yourself by going on the stage where--with a little rouge and a different colored wig, and a new nose, and skirts instead of trousers, or trousers instead of skirts, and age instead of youth, and badness instead of goodness--you can give your ego a perfectly limitless number of happy holidays. But if you were oldish, I say, and pitifully 'shut in', just how would you go to work, I wonder, to rest your personality? How for instance could you take your biggest, grayest, oldest worry about your doctor's bill, and rouge it up into a radiant, young joke? And how, for instance, out of your lonely, dreary, middle-aged orphanhood are you going to find a way to short-skirt your rheumatic pains, and braid into two perfectly huge pink-bowed pigtails the hair that you _haven't got_, and caper round so ecstatically before the foot-lights that the old gentleman and lady in the front seat absolutely swear you to be the living image of their 'long lost Amy'? And how, if the farthest journey you ever will take again is the monotonous hand-journey from your pillow to your medicine bottle, then how, for instance, with map or tinsel or attar of roses, can you go to work to solve even just for your own satisfaction the romantic, shimmering secrets of--Morocco?

"Ah! You've got me now, you think? All decided in your mind that I am an aged invalid? I didn't say so. I just said 'maybe'. Likelier than not I've saved my climax for its proper place. How do you know,--for instance, that I'm not a--'Cullud Pusson'?--So many people are."

Without signature of any sort, the letter ended abruptly then and there, and as though to satisfy his sense of something left unfinished, the Doctor began at the beginning and read it all over again in a mumbling, husky whisper.

"Maybe she is--'colored'," he volunteered at last.

"Very likely," said Stanton perfectly cheerfully. "It's just those occasional humorous suggestions that keep me keyed so heroically up to the point where I'm actually infuriated if you even suggest that I might be getting really interested in this mysterious Miss Molly! You haven't said a single sentimental thing about her that I haven't scoffed at--now have you?"

"N--o," acknowledged the Doctor. "I can see that you've covered your retreat all right. Even if the author of these letters should turn out to be a one-legged veteran of the War of 1812, you still could say, 'I told you so'. But all the same, I'll wager that you'd gladly give a hundred dollars, cash down, if you could only go ahead and prove the little girl's actual existence."

Stanton's shoulders squared suddenly but his mouth retained at least a faint vestige of its original smile.

"You mistake the situation entirely," he said. "It's the little girl's non-existence that I am most anxious to prove."

Then utterly without reproach or interference, he reached over and grabbed a forbidden cigar from the Doctor's cigar case, and lighted it, and retreated as far as possible into the gray film of smoke.

It was minutes and minutes before either man spoke again. Then at last after much crossing and re-crossing of his knees the Doctor asked drawlingly, "And when is it that you and Cornelia are planning to be married?"

"Next April," said Stanton briefly.

"U--m--m," said the Doctor. After a few more minutes he said, "U--m--m," again.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Maybe she is--'colored,'" he volunteered at last]

The second "U--m--m" seemed to irritate Stanton unduly. "Is it your head that's spinning round?" he asked tersely. "You sound like a Dutch top!"

The Doctor raised his hands cautiously to his forehead. "Your story does make me feel a little bit giddy," he acknowledged. Then with sudden intensity, "Stanton, you're playing a dangerous game for an engaged man. Cut it out, I say!"

"Cut what out?" said Stanton stubbornly.

The Doctor pointed exasperatedly towards the big box of letters. "Cut those out," he said. "A sentimental correspondence with a girl who's--more interesting than your fiancee!"