hole heart is in it, and when
he isn't talking about reaching the people, he talks about what he calls
'technique.'"

"Are you sure it isn't poetry?" inquired Miss Priscilla, humming back
like a bee to the tempting sweets of conjecture. "I've always heard that
poetry was the ruination of Poe."

"No, it isn't poetry--not exactly at least--it's plays," answered Susan.
"He talked to me till twelve o'clock last night while we were arranging
his books, and he told me that he meant to write really great dramas,
but that America wasn't ready for them yet and that was why he had had
to sell his clothes. He looked positively starved, but he says he
doesn't mind starving a while if he can only live up to his ideal."

"Well, I wonder what his ideal is?" remarked Miss Priscilla grimly.

"It has something to do with his belief that art can grow only out of
sacrifice," said Susan. "I never heard anybody--not even Jinny's father
in church--talk so much about sacrifice."

"But the rector doesn't talk about sacrifice for the theatre," retorted
the teacher, and she added with crushing finality, "I don't believe
there is a particle of sense in it. If he is going to write, why on
earth doesn't he sit straight down and do it? Why, when little Miss
Amanda Sheppard was left at sixty without a roof over her head, she
began at once, without saying a word to anybody, to write historical
novels."

"It does seem funny until you talk with him," admitted Susan. "But he is
so much in earnest that when you listen to him, you can't help believing
in him. He is so full of convictions that he convinces you in spite of
yourself."

"Convictions about what?" demanded Miss Priscilla. "I don't see how a
young man who refuses to be confirmed can have any convictions."

"Well, he has, and he feels just as strongly about them as we do about
ours."

"But how can he possibly feel as strongly about a wrong conviction as we
do about a right one?" insisted the older woman stubbornly, for she
realized vaguely that they were approaching dangerous ground and set out
to check their advance in true Dinwiddie fashion, which was strictly
prohibitive.

"I like a man who has opinions of his own and isn't ashamed to stand up
for them," said Virginia with a resolution that made her appear suddenly
taller.

"Not _false_ opinions, Jinny!" rejoined Miss Priscilla, and her manner
carried them with a bound back to the schoolroom, for her mental vision
saw in a flash t