ter
when Tolly came to my rescue with the offer of a nice warm dance to
nourish me up.

"Don't make me kidnap you, Betty; go fluff and rose up a bit," he
commanded, as he seated himself on the front steps with a determination
which was as business-like as his management of the Electric Light
Company.

"I think I had better go to Sue's to thaw out some of my loneliness
over this play," I answered him as I looked up with desperation and a
smudge on my face. Then I went to my room and left Tolly alone with
Peter's poor little heroine. "Say, tell the poet to get the man with the
dinner-pail who is eating hunk sandwiches at lunch-time on the pavement
in front of any construction job in New York to tell him what he did and
said to his girl at the firemen's ball the night before, and then
translate it into some of this first-class poetry. That'll be a great
play," said Tolly, as I came down-stairs just as he had turned page
twenty-five of Peter's manuscript. Tolly's coarseness doesn't affect me
as it does Edith because there is always so much point to it.

"You don't quite understand Peter and his play, Tolly, dear," I said,
with dignity, though I felt exactly the same way about it and hadn't
known how to express it in human interest terms as well as Tolly.

"I sure don't," answered Tolly, cheerfully, and not at all as if I had
put him in his place in regard to his criticism of our epic. "Come on;
let's hurry. Everybody is waiting for us."

It was good to be in a buzz of girls and men once more for the first
time in two weeks since I settled down to do my worst or best by Peter,
with my Grandmother Nelson's garden-book locked up in the
preserve-closet down in the darkest corner of the cellar, and Sam lost
in the fastness of The Briers.

Everybody wanted to dance with me at the same time, and the girls
kissed me into a lovely, warm cheerfulness. The girls in Hayesboro are
the sustaining kind of friends, like pound-cake, sweetened and
beautifully frosted. "Has he consented to let the hero kiss the poor
thing's hand before he goes to fight the case of the miners?" Julia
whispered, warmly, as she took a few tango steps with me in her arms
before Billy Robertson claimed her and Tolly picked me up to juggle with
me in his new Kentucky version of the fox-trot.

"I'm expecting a letter to-morrow," I answered her as Tolly slid me away
three steps, skidded two, and slid back four. And then, having begun, I
danced; all of me dan