"Dee, you make me tired--you argue like a Sunday School superintendent who is thinking about turning into a preacher. The idea of the Almighty's changing His mind to start out with! Don't you know that from the very beginning of everything the Almighty has planned our proportions, such as they are, and He would no more put a little on here and pull a little off there than He would start to make a mouse and turn it into a cat?"

"All right, if you think a beauty doctor can do more than the Almighty, then I think your theology needs looking after."

"I know one thing," I said: "I know it is after seven and you will keep your father waiting for his dinner when we already kept him waiting for his luncheon. The Greens are to have dinner with us, and it is mighty rude to keep them waiting."

Tweedles hurriedly got into their dinner dresses and were only ten minutes late, after all.

"What made you girls so late?" demanded Zebedee, when we were seated around the table, encouraging our appet.i.tes with soup, which is what the domestic science lecturers say is all that soup does.

"We were having a discussion, Dum and I. Page was the Dove of Peace, or we would be going it yet."

"Tell us what the discussion was about and we will forgive you," said Professor Green.

"It was about Mrs. Green's bones," blurted out Dum.

"My bones! I thought I had them so well covered that casual observers would not be conscious of them," laughed the beautiful skeleton, who was radiant in a gray-blue crepe de chine dress that either gave the selfsame color to her eyes or borrowed it from them, one could never make out which.

"Oh, we did not mean you were skinny," and Dum explained what the trend of the argument had been, much to the amus.e.m.e.nt of the owner of the bones in question and also of her husband and Zebedee.

"Miss Dum's argument reminds me of something that Du Maurier says in that rather remarkable little book, 'Trilby,'" said Professor Green. "He says that Trilby's bones were beautiful, and even when she was in the last stages of a wasting disease, the wonderful proportion of her bones kept her beautiful."

"There now, Dee, consider yourself beaten!" and Dee acknowledged her defeat by helping Dum to the heart of the celery.

We had a merry dinner and found our new friends as interesting as they seemed to find us. We discussed everything from Shakespeare to the movies. Professor Green was not a bit pedagogic, which was a great comfort. Persons who teach so often work out of hours--teach all the time. If preachers and teachers would join a union and make a compact for an eight-hour workday, what a comfort it would be to the community at large!

"Edwin, Miss Allison----"

"Please call me Page!"

"Well, then, Page--it certainly does come more trippingly on my tongue--Page is meaning to write, and she, too, is putting things down in a notebook."

"I advised that," said Mr. Tucker. "It seems to me that if from the beginning I had only started a notebook, I would have a valuable possession by now. As I get older my memory is not so good."

When Zebedee talked about getting older it always made people laugh. He sounded somehow as little boys do when they say what they are going to do when they put on long pants. I fancy he and Professor Green were about the same age, but he certainly looked younger. He must have been born looking younger than ever a baby looked before, and eternal youth was his.

"I know a man in New York, newspaper man, who began systematically keeping a sc.r.a.p-book when he was a youth. He indexed it and compiled it with much care, and now that he is quite an old man he actually gets his living--and a very good living at that--out of that sc.r.a.p-book,"

declared Zebedee. "He has information at hand for almost any subject, and the kind of intimate information one would not find in an encyclopedia. He will get up an article on any subject the editors demand, and that kind of handy man commands good pay."

"It is certainly a good habit to form if you want to do certain kinds of writing, but it takes a very strong will for a writer of fiction who runs a notebook not to be coerced by that notebook. I mean in this way: make the characters do certain things or say certain things just to lead up to some anecdote that the author happens to have heard and jotted down in his notebook. Anecdotes in books should happen just as naturally as they do in life: come in because there is some reason for them. The author who deliberately makes a setting for some good story that has no bearing on the subject-matter is a bore just as the chronic joke-teller is. If you can see the writer leading up to a joke, can see the notebook method too plainly, it is bad art. I'd rather have puns--they are at least spontaneous."

"Please lend me your pencil, Zebedee," I entreated.

"What are you going to do with it?"

"Write down what Professor Green has just said in my notebook. I think some day it may come in handy."

"You mean as a warning to all young authors?" questioned the professor.

"Oh, no, I think I may have my characters all sitting around a table at a hotel in Charleston and gradually work up to the point and have some one get it off."

And Mrs. Green, also an advocate of the notebook system as a memory jogger, applauded me for my sauciness to her wise husband.

CHAPTER XI

THE GUITAR

"Page," whispered Dee to me, "do you know, I can't sleep tonight unless I know that the awful rope hanging to that chandelier has been taken away. I have a terrible feeling that Louis might get despondent again and go back there and try to do the same thing. I can't call the thing by name--it seems so horrible."

I knew that Dee was still laboring under quite a strain. During dinner she had been very quiet, and now that we had adjourned to the pleasant courtyard on which the dining room opened, where the gentlemen were indulging in coffee and cigars and the rest of us were contenting ourselves with just coffee, she seemed to be nervous and fidgety.

Zebedee noticed it, too, and every now and then I caught him watching her with some anxiety.

To catch a young man in the nick of time and keep him from making away with himself is cause for congratulation but not conducive to calmness, when one happens to be only seventeen and not overly calm at that.

"Why don't you tell your father?" I whispered back.

"He'll think I am silly, and then, too, I don't want him to think that I think Louis is likely to repeat his performance. It might give him an idea that Louis is weak and make him lose interest in him. I don't consider him weak, but he is so down in the mouth there is no telling how the thing will work out. Can't you make up some plan? Couldn't we sneak off and go down there? Would you be afraid?"

"Afraid! Me? You know I am not afraid on the street, but I must say that old custard-colored house is some gruesome."

While I was wavering as to whether I could or couldn't go into the deserted hotel at night with no one but Dee, Professor Green proposed that all of us should take a walk down on the Battery.

"There is a wonderful moon rising this minute over there in the ocean and not one soul to welcome it."

So we quickly got into some wraps, as we remembered what a breeze could blow on the Battery, and Dee concealed under her coat her electric flashlight and I put my scissors in my pocket.

"We can shake the crowd and get our business attended to without anyone's being the wiser," I whispered.

A place that is ugly by day can be beautiful by moonlight, and a place that is beautiful by day can be so wonderful by moonlight that it positively hurts like certain strains of the violin in the "Humoresque"

or tones of a great contralto's voice. Charleston on that night was like a dream city. We pa.s.sed old St. Michael's churchyard, where the old cedar bed loomed like a soft, dark shadow among the white tombstones.

"How it shows up even at night!" said Zebedee. "It reminds me of what a friend of mine once said: that the way to make yourself heard in a noisy crowd and to attract the attention of everyone is to whisper. The noisy crowd will be quiet in a moment and everybody will try to hear what you are saying. The low-toned whisper of that old bedstead is heard above all the clamor of the snow-white, high-toned tombstones."

"Humph! Isn't our pa poetical tonight!" teased Dum.

"I should say I am! I bet you are, too, but you are too old to confess it. I glory in it."

We turned down Tradd Street to Legare, which is, I fancy, the most picturesque street in the United States. We had learned that afternoon to p.r.o.nounce Legare properly. We had naturally endeavored to give it the finest French accent, but were quietly put on the right track by Claire Gaillard. "Lagree" is the way, and now we aired our knowledge to the Greens, who were p.r.o.nouncing it wrong just as we had.

"Tradd Street was named for the first male child born in the Colony, so the guide-book tells me," said Mrs. Green. "If there were any females born, they did not see fit to commemorate the fact."

"Perhaps the early settlers did not consider the female of the race anything to be walked on--maybe they were not the downtrodden s.e.x that they are in the present day. A street is no good except to walk on or ride over, and surely a female's name would not be appropriate for such an object. My wife is very jealous for the rights of women, whether they be alive or dead," said Professor Green.

"They might at least name something after us besides things to eat.

Sally Lunn and Lady Baltimore cake are not much of a showing, to my mind," laughed Mrs. Green.