No martyr ever approached the stake with a more saddened visage
than he turned upon Bambi as the train pulled out. She waved her hand at
him, smiling pleasantly, but he was sorrowful to the last glimpse.

"Poor old baby!" she laughed. "He shall stay in New York a while. He is
getting too dependent on mamma."

She really welcomed his absence. It gave her so much more time for her
own work, which absorbed and delighted her. She had never known any
sensation so pleasurable as that sense of adventure with which, each
morning, she went to work. First, she patted the manuscript pile, which
grew so amazingly fast. Then she filled her fountain pen and looked off
over the treetops, beyond her window, until, like Peter Pan, she slipped
off into another world, the Land of Make Believe, a country she had
discovered for herself and peopled with human beings to suit her own
taste. To be sure, heir story concerned itself mainly with herself,
Jarvis, and the Professor, but only the traits that made them
individual, that made them "they," were selected, and the experiences
she took them through were entirely of her own making. It was such fun
to make them real by the power of words; to make many people know them
and love them, or condemn them, as the case might be. In fact, creation
was absorbing.

"It's very quiet around here since Jarvis left," commented the Professor
a few days later.

"I never thought Jarvis was noisy."

"Well, he's like distant thunder."

"And heat lightning," laughed Bambi.

"Do you happen to miss him?"

"Me? Oh, not at all. Do you?"

"It always frets me to have things mislaid that I am used to seeing
around. When you change the furnishings about, it upsets me."

"Do you look upon Jarvis as furniture?" she teased him.

"I look upon him as an anomaly."

"How so?"

"William Morris said, 'You should never have anything in your house
which you do not know to be useful, and believe to be beautiful.'"

"I think Jarvis is beautiful."

"That great mammoth?"

"He's like Apollo, or Adonis."

"He certainly needs all Olympus to stretch out on. He clutters up this
little house."

"I am sorry you don't like Jarvis, Professor."

"I do like him. I am used to him. I enjoy disagreeing with him. I wish
he would come home."

His daughter beamed on him.

"Then he is also useful as a whetstone upon which you sharpen your wits.
William Morris had nothing on me when I added Jarvis to our Penates."

Jarvis's