There was a pretty flush on Flossy’s cheek, but she answered, brightly: 

“You might try, Marion, and I’ll engage to practice on the character, if it is really and truly a good one.”

“I had a glimpse of Dr. Walden,” Eurie said, answering the question.  “He was pointed out to me yesterday.  He looked dignified enough to write a theological review. I’m not going to hear him.  What’s the use?  I came for fun, and I’m going in search of it all this day.  I have studied the programme, and there is just one thing that I’m going to attend, and that is Frank Beard’s ‘chalk talk.’  I know that will be capital, and he won’t bore one with a sermon poked in every two minutes.”

So the party divided for the day.  Marion and Ruth went to the stand, and Flossy strayed to a side tent, and what happened to her you shall presently hear.  Eurie wandered at her fancy, and enjoyed a “stupid time,” so she reported.

Marion’s pencil moved rapidly over the paper almost as soon as Dr. Walden commenced, until presently she whispered in dismay to Ruth: 

“I do wish he would say something to leave out!  This letter will be fearfully long.  How sharp he is, isn’t he?”

Then she scribbled again.  Ruth had the benefit of many side remarks.

“My!” Marion said, with an accompanying grimace.  “What an army of books!  All for Sunday-schools.  Three millions given out every Sunday!  Does that seem possible!  Brother Hart, I’m afraid you are mistaken.  Didn’t he say that was Dr. Hart’s estimate, Ruthie?  There is certainly a good chance for mine, if so many are needed every week.  I shall have to go right to work at it.  What if I should write one, Ruth, and what if it should take, and all the millions of Sunday-schools want it at once!  Just as likely as not.  I am a genius.  They never know it until afterward.  I shall certainly put you in, Ruthie, in some form.  So you are destined to immortality, remember.”

“I wish you wouldn’t whisper so much,” whispered back Ruth.  “People are looking at us in an annoyed way.  What is the matter with you, Marion?  I never knew you to run on in such an absurd way.  That is bad enough for Eurie!”

“I’m developing,” whispered Marion.  “It is the ’reflex influence of Chautauqua’ that you hear so much about.”

Then she wrote this sentence from Dr. Walden’s lips: 

“Every author whose books go into the Sabbath-school is as much a teacher in that school as though he had classes there.  A good book is a book that will aid the teacher in his work of bringing souls to Christ.  I have known the earnest teaching of months to be defeated by one single volume of the wrong kind being placed in the hands of the scholar.”

Suddenly Marion sat upright, slipped her pencil and note-book into her pocket, and wrote no more.  A sentence in that address had struck home.  This determination to enter the lists as a writer was not all talk.  She had long ago decided to turn her talents in that direction as the easiest thing in the line of literature, whither her taste ran.  She had read many of the standard Sunday-school books; read them with amused eyes and curling lips, and felt entirely conscious that she could match them in intellectual power and interest, and do nothing remarkable then.  But there rang before her this sentence: