. Instead of
thanking your God for that, you set out to be something you aren't. No,
it's worse than that. You're trying not to be what you are. And it's
going to do for you."

"Stop!" cried Fanny. "My head's whirling. It sounds like something out
of `Alice in Wonderland.'"

"And you," retorted Heyl, "sound like some one who's afraid to talk or
think about herself. You're suppressing the thing that is you. You're
cutting yourself off from your own people--a dramatic, impulsive,
emotional people. By doing those things you're killing the goose that
lays the golden egg. What's that old copy-book line? `To thine own self
be true,' and the rest of it."

"Yes; like Theodore, for example," sneered Fanny.

At which unpleasant point Nature kindly supplied a diversion. Across
the black sky there shot two luminous shafts of lights. Northern lights,
pale sisters of the chromatic glory one sees in the far north, but still
weirdly beautiful. Fanny and Heyl stopped short, faces upturned. The
ghostly radiance wavered, expanded, glowed palely, like celestial
searchlights. Suddenly, from the tip of each shaft, there burst a
cluster of slender, pin-point lines, like aigrettes set in a band of
silver. Then these slowly wavered, faded, combined to form a third and
fourth slender shaft of light. It was like the radiance one sees in the
old pictures of the Holy Family. Together Fanny and Heyl watched it in
silence until the last pale glimmer faded and was gone, and only the
brazen lights of Gary, far, far down the beach, cast a fiery glow
against the sky.

They sighed, simultaneously. Then they laughed, each at the other.

"Curtain," said Fanny. They raced for the station, despite the sand.
Their car was filled with pudgy babies lying limp in parental arms;
with lunch baskets exuding the sickly scent of bananas; with disheveled
vandals whose moist palms grasped bunches of wilted wild flowers. Past
the belching chimneys of Gary, through South Chicago, the back yard of a
metropolis, past Jackson Park that breathed coolly upon them, and so to
the city again. They looked at it with the shock that comes to eyes
that have rested for hours on long stretches of sand and sky and water.
Monday, that had seemed so far away, became an actuality of to-morrow.

Tired as they were, they stopped at one of those frank little
restaurants that brighten Chicago's drab side streets. Its windows were
full of pans that held baked beans, all crusty and brown