At the end of the first act he stopped and looked at the faces of his audience.  The Professor was awake and deeply puzzled.  This strange young man was holding up to his view a perfectly strange anomaly which he called a woman.  The Professor had never dreamed of such a hybrid.  He couldn’t grasp it.  He gasped at Jarvis’s audacity.

Bambi sat curled up in the end of a wicker couch, her feet drawn under her, like a Chinese idol, every nerve attuned to attention.  He noticed how, without words, she seemed to emanate responsiveness and understanding.

“Well?” he said.

“Let’s wait until you have finished to discuss it,” she said.

“Is it any good?”

“In spots it’s great.  In other spots it is incredibly rotten.”

“My child,” protested the Professor.

“Go on!” she ordered.

The second act began well, mounted halfway to its climax, and fell flat.  Some of the lines, embodying the new individualistic philosophy of woman, roused the Professor to protest.

“Rubbish, sir!” he cried.  “Impossible rubbish!  No woman ever thought such things.”

“Take your nose out of your calculus, and look about you, Professor,” retorted Jarvis.  “You haven’t looked around since the stone age.”

Bambi gurgled with laughter, then looked serious.

“He’s fallen on an idea just the same, Jarvis.  Your woman isn’t convincing.”

“But she’s true,” he protested.

“We don’t care a fig whether she’s true, unless she’s true to us,” she answered him.  “Go on with your last act.”

“You don’t like it—­what’s the use?”

“Don’t be silly.  I am deeply interested.  Go on!”

He began a little hopelessly, feeling the atmosphere, by that subtle sense that makes the creative artist like a sensitive plant where his work is at stake.  The third act failed to ascend, or to resolve the situation.  He merely carried it as far as it interested him, and then dropped it.  As he closed the manuscript Bambi reached out her hand for it.

“Give it to me, in my hand!” she ordered.  He obeyed, questioningly.

“I feel as if it was such a big thing, mangled and bleeding.  I want to hold it and help it.”

“Mangled?”

“Yes.  Don’t you feel it?  She isn’t a woman!  She’s a monster.  You don’t believe her.  You won’t believe her, because you hate her.”

“But she’s true.  She lives to-day.  She is the woman of now,” he repeated.

“No, no, no!  Woman may approximate this, but she doesn’t reason it out.  Let her be fine, and big, and righteously ambitious.  Make us sympathize with her.”

“But I am preaching against her.”

“All the better.  Make her a tragedy.  Show the futility of it all.  She didn’t kill herself.  You killed her.”

“Do you write plays?” he asked her.

“No, but I feel drama.  This is big, but it is all man psychology.  You don’t know your woman.”