our head once and for
all that I'm telling you a fact and that you've got to believe it. I
made up my book of recollections. They're not true, not one of them. As
I remember, there isn't one. The letters I wrote myself."

Electra was staring at her in a neutrality which was not even wonder.

Finally she spoke; her awed voice trembled.

"The Brook Farm letters!"

Perhaps it was this reverent hesitation which restored Madam Fulton to
something of her wonted state.

"For heaven's sake, Electra," she fulminated, "what is there so sacred
about Brook Farm? If anybody is going to make up letters from anywhere,
why shouldn't it be from there?"

Electra was looking at Billy Stark as if she bade him save her from
these shocks or tell her the whole world was rocking. But Billy twirled
his eyeglass, and watched it twirling. Finally he had to meet her eye.

"Yes," he said, with a composure he did not feel, "the book is
apparently not quite straight--a kind of joke, in fact."

Electra rose. She looked very thoughtful and also, Madam Fulton thought,
with a quaking at her guilty heart, rather terrible. She was pinched at
the nostrils and white about the lips.

"What I must do first," she was saying, as if to herself, "is to notify
the club we cannot possibly have our inquiry afternoon."

"Notify them!" repeated Madam Fulton, in a spasm of fearful admiration.
"Are you going to tell all those women?"

Electra included her in that absent glance. Now that there were things
to arrange, dates to cancel, topics to consider, she was on her own
ground. She spoke with dignity:--

"I shall most certainly tell nobody. A thing like that had better die as
soon as possible. I cannot"--she turned upon her grandmother, a look of
passionate interrogation on her face--"I cannot understand you."

Madam Fulton answered humbly, yet with some eagerness, as if Electra
might readily be excused from so stiff a task,

"You never would, Electra, not if you lived a hundred years."

Electra was the accuser now, age and kinship quite forgotten.

"Why did you do a thing like that?"

"For fun," said the old lady faintly.

"For fun!" The tree of sin grew and flowered as she thought upon it.
"You offered to buy this house with that money, unclean money from the
sales of that fraudulent book!"

Madam Fulton turned to Billy Stark with a childlike gesture of real
surprise.

"Is it unclean money, Billy?" she asked. "Do you call it that?"

"We mustn