She really welcomed his absence.  It gave her so much more time for her own work, which absorbed and delighted her.  She had never known any sensation so pleasurable as that sense of adventure with which, each morning, she went to work.  First, she patted the manuscript pile, which grew so amazingly fast.  Then she filled her fountain pen and looked off over the treetops, beyond her window, until, like Peter Pan, she slipped off into another world, the Land of Make Believe, a country she had discovered for herself and peopled with human beings to suit her own taste.  To be sure, heir story concerned itself mainly with herself, Jarvis, and the Professor, but only the traits that made them individual, that made them “they,” were selected, and the experiences she took them through were entirely of her own making.  It was such fun to make them real by the power of words; to make many people know them and love them, or condemn them, as the case might be.  In fact, creation was absorbing.

“It’s very quiet around here since Jarvis left,” commented the Professor a few days later.

“I never thought Jarvis was noisy.”

“Well, he’s like distant thunder.”

“And heat lightning,” laughed Bambi.

“Do you happen to miss him?”

“Me?  Oh, not at all.  Do you?”

“It always frets me to have things mislaid that I am used to seeing around.  When you change the furnishings about, it upsets me.”

“Do you look upon Jarvis as furniture?” she teased him.

“I look upon him as an anomaly.”

“How so?”

“William Morris said, ’You should never have anything in your house which you do not know to be useful, and believe to be beautiful.’”

“I think Jarvis is beautiful.”

“That great mammoth?”

“He’s like Apollo, or Adonis.”

“He certainly needs all Olympus to stretch out on.  He clutters up this little house.”

“I am sorry you don’t like Jarvis, Professor.”

“I do like him.  I am used to him.  I enjoy disagreeing with him.  I wish he would come home.”

His daughter beamed on him.

“Then he is also useful as a whetstone upon which you sharpen your wits.  William Morris had nothing on me when I added Jarvis to our Penates.”

Jarvis’s first letter she read aloud to her father, and they both laughed at it, it was so Jarvis-like.

“Dear Bambi,” he wrote, “I am in this vile cesspool of humanity again, and I feel like a drowning gnat.  I did not go to the club, as you told me to, because I thought I could live more economically if I took a room somewhere and ‘ate around,’ I left my bag at the station, while I went to an address given me by a young man I met on the train.  He said it was plain but clean.  He told me some experiences he had had in boarding and lodging houses.  They were awful!  This place is an old three-story house, of the fiendish mid-Victorian brand—­dark halls, high ceilings, and marble mantels.  It seemed clean, so I took a room, almost as large as your linen closet, where I shall spend the few days I am here.  My room has a court outlook, and was hotter than Tophet last night, but of course you expect to be hot in summer.