mean so little to women but so
much to girls. Two years went by, and then came that brave book! It
was like coming across a half-forgotten friend. I actually ran home
with it, and sat up all night to complete it. It was splendid. It was
the poem matured, broadened, rounded. And finally your first play! How
I listened to every word, watched every move! I wrote you a letter
that night, but tore it up, not having the courage to send it to you.
How versatile you must be: a poem, a book, a play! I have seen all
your plays these five years, plays merry and gay, sad and grave. How
many times you have mysteriously told me to be brave! I envy and
admire you. What an exquisite thing it must be to hear one's thoughts
spoken across the footlights! Please do not laugh. It would hurt me to
know that you could laugh at my honest admiration. You won't laugh,
will you? I am sure you will value this letter for its honesty rather
than for its literary quality. I have often wondered what you were
like. But after all, that can not matter, since you are good and kind
and wise; for you can not be else, and write the lofty things you do.

Warrington put the letter away, placed it carefully among the few
things he held of value. It would not be true to say that it left him
unaffected. There was an innocent barb in this girlish admiration, and
it pierced the quick of all that was good in him.

"Good and kind and wise," he mused. "If only the child knew! Heigh-ho!
I am kind, sometimes I've been good, and often wise. Well, I can't
disillusion the child, happily; she has given me no address."

He rose, wheeled his chair to a window facing the street, and opened
it. The cool fresh April air rushed in, clearing the room of its
opalescent clouds, cleansing his brain of the fever that beset it. He
leaned with his elbows on the sill and, breathed noisily, gratefully.
Above, heaven had decked her broad bosom with her flickering stars,
and from the million lamps of the great city rose and floated a
tarnished yellow haze. So many sounds go forth to make the voices of
the night: somewhere a child was crying fretfully, across the way the
faint tinkle of a piano, the far-off rattle of the elevated, a muffled
laugh from a window, above, the rat-tat of a cab-horse, the breeze in
the ivy clinging to the walls of the church next door, the quarrelsome
chirp of the sleepy sparrows; and then, recurrence. Only the poet or
the man in pain opens his ears to these sou