The girl still wore her hat, but she had removed her jacket, and it lay with a little brown package on the sofa.

As she spoke to him he was struck afresh by the singular concentration of her expression.
"Your mother tells me that you've written a play," she began, a little shyly; "she says, too, that it is wonderful." "'She says' is well put," he retorted gaily, "but I hear that you, also, are among the prophets." "I am nothing else," she answered earnestly.

"It is everything to me--it is my life." Her frankness startled him unpleasantly, and but for her girlish prettiness, he might have felt himself almost repelled.

As it was he merely glanced appealingly at his mother, who intervened with a gesture of her knitting needle.

"She writes stories," explained the old lady, appearing to transfix her subject on the ivory point; "it is just as I imagined." The girl herself met his eyes almost fiercely, reminding him vaguely of the look with which a lioness might defend her threatened young.
"I've done nothing yet," she declared, "but I mean to--I mean to if it takes every single hour I have to live." Then her manner changed suddenly, and she impressed him as melting from her hard reserve.