-she, Melissa Merriam! Her words would be immortalized
in print! and she would soar up and up... Some day, in the big
magazines... Everybody would read her name there--all Cherryvale--and,
perhaps, Ridgeley Holman Dobson would chance a brilliant, authoritative
article on some deep, vital subject and wish to meet the author.

She might even have to go to New York to live--New York! And associate
with the interesting, delightful people there. Maybe he lived in New
York, or, anyway, visited there, associating with celebrities.

She wished her skirts were long enough to hold up gracefully like Polly
Currier walking over there across the street; she wished she had long,
dangling ear-rings; she wished...

Dreamy-eyed, the Society Editor of the Cherryvale Beacon turned in at
the Merriam gate to announce her estate to an amazed family circle.

Aunt Nettie, of course, ejaculated, "goodness gracious!" and laughed.
But mother was altogether sweet and satisfying. She looked a little
startled at first, but she came over and smoothed her daughter's hair
while she listened, and, for some reason, was unusually tender all the
afternoon.

That evening at supper-time, Missy noticed that mother walked down the
block to meet father, and seemed to be talking earnestly with him
on their way toward the house. Missy hadn't much dreaded father's
opposition. He was an enormous, silent man and the young people stood
in a certain awe of him, but Missy, somehow, felt closer to him than to
most old people.

When he came up the steps to the porch where she waited, blushing and
palpitant but withal feeling a sense of importance, he greeted her
jovially. "Well, I hear we've got a full-fledged writer in our midst!"

Missy's blush deepened.

"What _I_ want to know," father continued, "is who's going to darn my
socks? I'm afraid socks go to the dickens when genius flies in at the
window."

As Missy smiled back at him she resolved, despite everything, to keep
father's socks in better order than ever before.

During supper the talk kept coming back to the theme of her Work, but
in a friendly, unscoffing way so that Missy knew her parents were
really pleased. Mother mentioned Mrs. Brooks's "bridge" Thursday
afternoon--that might make a good write-up. And father said he'd get her
a leather-bound notebook next day. And when, after supper, instead of
joining them on the porch, she brought tablet and pencil and a pile of
books and placed them on the d