"The vote was almost unanimous," I remarked stiffly.

She stared at me doubtfully. "Well, maybe that story is good but I know I couldn't do it again. And anyhow my mother told me the plot."

"Oh," I said. It was really the plot that had won the prize, you understand, though indeed I had found the style eminently praiseworthy also according to all the principles of criticism. It almost fulfilled the rhetorical rules about unity, ma.s.s and coherence.

"So you will let me withdraw?" she questioned timidly, "here's the ten dollars." She held out the crumpled bill which she had been clutching all the evening.

I thought I might as well be going. "It's allowable to use your own mother's plot," I a.s.sured her, "don't bother about that. Good bye."

Without looking at her I hurried through the alleyway into the corridor, flew past the sanctum, darted into the staircase, then halted, turned around, stopped at the water-cooler for a taste of ice water, then walked slowly back to her room.

I put my head in at the door. "You heard me say, didn't you, that the story has gone to press?"

She lifted her face from that same yellow silk pillow. "Yes," she said.

"All right." I started away briskly as if I thought I was going, but I didn't. This time I turned around, went clear into the room and sat down on the couch.

"And anyway," I said, "you haven't any right to deceive your mother like that. It is robbing her of a joy that she surely deserves. She has earned it. You haven't any right not to tell her that your story won the prize.

Whether we let you withdraw it or not, it would be wrong for you to steal that pleasure from your own mother. You are thinking merely of your own selfish wishes."

"No, no, no! Don't you see?" She flung herself toward me. "It is like being a surgeon. I must cut out the ambition. I can never fulfill it.

Never, never, I tell you. The news of this prize will make it grow and grow like a cancer or something, till it will hurt worse, maim, kill, when I fail at last. If she would only see that I love mathematics and can do something in that maybe some day. But in literature. Suppose I shut myself up for years, struggle, struggle, struggle to wring out something that isn't in me, while she wears herself out to support me.

The publishers will send it back, one after another. I can't write, I tell you. I know it. It will be all an awful sacrifice--a useless sacrifice, with no issue except waste of her life and my life. Don't you see?"

"Don't you think," said I calmly, "don't you think that you are just a little foolish and intense?" That is what a professor said to me once and it had a wonderfully reducing effect. So I tried it on this excited little freshman. But the result was different. Instead of clearing the atmosphere with a breeze of half mortified laughter, it created a stillness like the stillness before a whirlwind. I got up hastily. "I think I had better be going," I said.

This time I heard the key turn in the lock behind me as I walked rapidly away. Actually I had to hold myself in to keep from scuttling away like a whipped puppy. That is how I felt inside. I didn't believe that she would ever forgive me. There were two compensations for this episode in my editorial career: one was the realization that the little freshman had plenty of dignity to fall back on, the other was that she would not be very likely to ask again for the return of the prize story.

Considering that this was my sincere att.i.tude, you may imagine how amazed I was to hear my name called by this young person the very next morning.

She came running up to me at the instant my fingers were on the k.n.o.b of the sanctum door. Her hands were filled with those little cardboard rhomboids, polyhedrons, prisms and so forth which the freshmen have to make for their geometry work.

"I'm going to do it," she began breathlessly, "I'm going to tell my mother. Perhaps it would please her more if--if you should write me a note on paper with the name of the Monthly at the top, you know. She used to be an editor when she was in college. In it say that the board gave me the prize. I think it will please her."

"I shall be delighted," I exclaimed. Then something in the way she was gazing down at those geometrical monstrosities (I never could endure mathematics myself) made me want to comfort her.

"Why, child, it won't be necessary to sacrifice math entirely. You can elect a.n.a.lytics and calculus to balance the lit and rhetoric. Cheer up."

She raised eyes br.i.m.m.i.n.g with tears. "My mother thinks that math has an adverse tendency. She doesn't want me to take much science either. She says that science deals with facts, literature with the impression of facts."

"Oh," I remarked. You notice that I had found occasion to use the foregoing expletive several times since first meeting Miss Maria Mitch.e.l.l Kiewit.

She nodded gloomily in acknowledgment of my sympathetic comprehension.

"Yes, once when I described lights in a fog as 'losing their chromatic ident.i.ty' instead of saying they 'blurred into the mist,' she asked me to drop physics in the high school. She said it was ruinous, it was destroying the delicacy of my perceptions."

"Doesn't your mother ever----" I hesitated, then decisively, "doesn't she ever laugh?"

Maria dimpled suddenly. "Oh, yes, yes! She's my dearest, best friend, and we have fun all the time except when she talks about my becoming a writer. She said that now at college I could show if there was any hope in me. She meant that this is my chance to learn to write. I--I----" She paused and glanced at me dubiously from under her lashes. "I sent in that story just to show her that I couldn't write. I was going to tell her I had tried and failed."

"Oh!" Then I chuckled, and the freshman after a moment of half resentful pouting joined in with a small reluctant laugh.

"It is funny," she said, "I think that maybe from your side of the affair it is awfully funny. But----"

I turned the k.n.o.b swiftly. "No but about it. I shall write that note this minute, and you shall mail it home at once. That is the only right thing to do."

"Yes." She heaved a deep, long sigh. "I know that. I have worked it all out as an original in geometry. For instance: Given, an unselfish mother with a special ambition for her rebellious selfish daughter. Problem: to decide which one should sacrifice her own wishes. Let the mother's desire equal this straight line, and the daughter's inclination equal this straight line at right angles to the other. To prove----"

"See here, little girl," I interrupted her kindly but firmly, "no wonder your mother dreads the effect of mathematical studies on your tender brain! I said farewell to geometry exactly two years and four months ago.

I did the examination in final trig three times. Comprehend? Now run into your own room and get that letter written quick. If you are very agreeable indeed, I may let you enclose the proof sheets, who knows?"

"Thank you," she exclaimed in impulsive joy, "that will be lovely. Mother will be so pleased." Then the vision of coming woe in exile from beloved calculations descended upon her, and she hugged the paper figures so convulsively that the sharpest, most beautiful angle of the biggest polyhedron cracked clear across from edge to edge. They were perfectly splendid clean edges, edges that even I could see had been formed by the carefully loving hands of a mathematical prodigy.

After that day came a pause in the drama (Adele declared that it was really a tragedy caused by one life trying to bend another to its will) until the day when the new issue of the Monthly arrived in the noon mail.

As Robbie Belle was still in the infirmary of course, the rest of the board took hold of her share of the work. We divided the list of subscribers between us, and started out to distribute the magazines at the different rooms in the various dormitories.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SHE WAVED AN OPEN LETTER IN HER HAND]

Part of my route happened to include the neighborhood of the sanctum.

Just as I turned into Maria's alleyway to leave the three copies always provided for every contributor, she came dashing out of her room in such a headlong rush that I barely saved my equilibrium by a rapid jump to one side. As soon as she could control her own impetus she whirled and bore down upon me once more.

"Mercy, mercy!" I cried, backing into a corner by the hinges and holding my pile of magazines in front as a rampart, "don't be an automobile any more."

She waved an open letter in her hand.

"Mother says I may elect all the math I want. She says I can't write a little bit. She says that this prize story shows I can't. She says it is awful--all except the plot, and that isn't mine, you know. She says that the vocabulary, sentence structure, everything proves me mathematical to the centre of my soul. She says she has always been afraid she was making a mistake to force a square peg into a round hole. I'm the peg, you understand. She says I needn't struggle any more, and she'll be just as proud of a mathematical genius as of a mechanical author. She says she is grateful for the honor of the prize, but she thinks the board of editors made a mistake."

I walked feebly into the room, sank on the couch, and propped myself against that yellow silk pillow.

"It's horrid to be an editor," I said, "especially when Robbie Belle has to go and get taken to the infirmary just when I need her most."

"My mother knows," chanted the little freshman, "and she says I can't write a little bit. She says I can elect mathematics. Whoopee!"

CHAPTER XIII

JUST THIS ONCE

Ellen drummed restlessly on the window pane. "I'm 'most sure it would not matter just this once. We've had the mildest sort of a fever, and I don't see yet why they keep us shut up so long away off here. I'm crazy to send a letter home."

Lila's thin shoulders gave an irritable little shrug under the silken folds of her dressing-gown, and her finely cut features screwed for an instant into an expression of impatient dislike. It was only for an instant--then the mask of her conventional courtesy dropped again between the two convalescents.

"Why not tell the doctor or the nurse what you wish to write? They will attend to it for you. Infection may be conveyed in a dozen ways, you know. We are beginning to peel, and that is the worst----"

"Oh, are we?" broke in Ellen excitedly, "are we really peeling?" She lifted one hand and examined the wrist. "No, I'm not even beginning.

Every morning the moment I wake up I rub and rub, but it won't peel. It simply won't. And I've got to stay here till I do. Are you peeling?

Really?"