this struggle to keep ahead
of the apings of the stupid."

"Yes, yes, so I find it. Little up-start muddling gods have quite fogged
up the milky way with their nebulous creations--but pardon me if I
suggest that I would rather that you put your mother's hair back on."

She had some difficulty in putting her mother's hair on straight; so Gud
reached over, and with a few deft touches, arranged it for her. Then,
plucking a button from his robe, he burnished it on his sleeve until it
shone silvery bright, and then he held it before her. She looked into
the mirroring silver and gave a little rapturous cry of joy, for the
hair of her mother, on which they had both wasted so much henna, had
been turned into a brilliant shade of fluorescent opalescence--a color
that no artist of the Latin Quarter had ever painted and that no artist
of the Village had ever imagined.

"Oh, Gud," she cried, "now I know that I love you, for they will go mad
about it and I shall be the queen of the studios."

"I would rather that you remain just a woman as you have so sweetly
shown yourself to be."

"Never!" cried she who wanted something that no one could understand,
"never, never, will I be content to be just a woman! I must be, oh so
much more. I must have super-personality, and hyper-yearnings, and
ultra-strivings and transcendent seekings after ultimate
mysteries--really I don't think you understand me at all!"

"Has any one ever understood you?" asked Gud.

"No," she breathed in soft expectancy.

"Only a little while ago you were searching for something that no one
could understand--have we not found it in yourself?"

"Perhaps," she spoke dubiously.

"And if you were in my book, would it not then contain something that no
one could understand?"

"Do you mean it?" she faltered.

"Yes, dear child, for whom all writers write, if it will bring me one
more smile from those ever-changing eyes of beauty--I will see that you
are in '_The Book of Gud_'--if I have to catch these blasphemous scribes
and pound their heads together!"

"For that promise," said the iridescent lady, "I could love you forever
and a day. To think that we two should be in a book together! Just me
and Gud!

"And now," she added, in a lower tone, "I'll confess to you why I want
to be in the book. You see, I am supposed to be a literary character and
one has to be in a book to be a literary character, you know."

"Yes, yes, I know. I suppose it will make me one a