CHAPTER

I. An Idyl of the Idle
II.  The Idler
III.  The Green Mouse
IV.  An Ideal Idol
V. Sacharissa
VI.  In Wrong
VII.  The Invisible Wire
VIII.  “In Heaven and Earth”
IX.  A Cross-town Car
X. The Lid Off
XI.  Betty
XII.  Sybilla
XIII.  The Crown Prince
XIV.  Gentlemen of the Press
XV.  Drusilla
XVI.  Flavilla

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

“She almost wished some fisherman might come into view”

“‘Those squirrels are very tame,’ she observed calmly”

“‘Are you not terribly impatient?’ she inquired”

“The lid of the basket tilted a little....  Then a plaintive voice said ‘Meow-w!’”

“‘I’m afraid,’ he ventured, ‘that I may require that table for cutting’”

“‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘I had better hold your pencil again’”

[Illustration]

I

AN IDYL OF THE IDYL

In Which a Young Man Arrives at His Last Ditch and a Young Girl Jumps Over It

Utterly unequipped for anything except to ornament his environment, the crash in Steel stunned him.  Dazed but polite, he remained a passive observer of the sale which followed and which apparently realized sufficient to satisfy every creditor, but not enough for an income to continue a harmlessly idle career which he had supposed was to continue indefinitely.

He had never earned a penny; he had not the vaguest idea of how people made money.  To do something, however, was absolutely necessary.

He wasted some time in finding out just how much aid he might expect from his late father’s friends, but when he understood the attitude of society toward a knocked-out gentleman he wisely ceased to annoy society, and turned to the business world.

Here he wasted some more time.  Perhaps the time was not absolutely wasted, for during that period he learned that he could use nobody who could not use him; and as he appeared to be perfectly useless, except for ornament, and as a business house is not a kindergarten, and furthermore, as he had neither time nor money to attend any school where anybody could teach him anything, it occurred to him to take a day off for minute and thorough self-examination concerning his qualifications and even his right to occupy a few feet of space upon the earth’s surface.

Four years at Harvard, two more in postgraduate courses, two more in Europe to perfect himself in electrical engineering, and a year at home attempting to invent a wireless apparatus for intercepting and transmitting psychical waves had left him pitifully unfit for wage earning.

There remained his accomplishments; but the market was overstocked with assorted time-killers.