I didn’t quite like for Sam to forget Peter’s play like that, and I liked it less when I heard Julia say that she thought it was so fortunate that Sam had cured Peter of being a poet, so he could go into his father’s office to learn to take care of his great fortune.  Peter likes Julia so much that I think she ought to have appreciated the great thing in him more than she did.  When the copy of the Review, with Peter’s poem on the Ultimate, came, he read the whole poem to her while she embroidered an initial in the corner of a handkerchief for him.  The next day she told me that she couldn’t understand a word about it, and that it made Pink mad because she wouldn’t tell him what to say to Peter about it.  Pink has grown fond of Peter, but he wouldn’t try to read the poem after the third stanza.  But Peter went on back to help with the rye crop, knowing nothing of all that.

Of course, I had all the confidence that there is in the world in Sam, but I, about the first week in July, again began to feel responsible to the world for Peter’s play; and I might have made the awful blunder of remonstrating with Peter or Sam or both of them if I hadn’t got into so much trouble with Edith and Tolly.

Now, Clyde Tolbot is a very business-like young man, and he ought to be respected and considered for it, but that is just what Edith doesn’t seem to understand how to do.  She wants to go on with her head level with the moon, and Tolly wants to get married in November, and I think he is perfectly right.  He hasn’t any family, and he says Edith’s “highstrikes,” as he calls her moods and tenses, and the food at the Hayesboro Inn, are making him thin and pale, and hurting the prospects of The Electric Light Co.

“She acts as if she thought I was a cinnamon bear if I put my paw on her fair hand.  And she seems to think it is scandal because I wanted to buy that old mahogany sideboard that the Vertreeses had to sell when they inherited old Mrs. Anderson and her furniture from his mother,” he groaned, as he sat on my side porch with his head in his hands.

“Tolly,” I said, with firm conviction in my voice and manner, “you must do something heroic to shock Edith down to earth again, or into opening her eyes as those kittens daddy gave Byrd did on their ninth day.  The evening of Edith’s eighth day has about struck.”

“It most certainly has, and about eleven-thirty at that,” answered Tolly, sitting up as if about to rush forth and do what I suggested, though neither he nor I knew what it was.  “But what is your idea of a heroic deed that will pluck the child Edith?” he asked, just as if I were one of the clerks out at the power-house and he was conducting a business detail.

“Well, let me see, Tolly,” I said, slowly, while I ran over in my mind all the lover heroics I had ever heard of from runaway horses to the use of a hated blond rival.  “You couldn’t get hurt slightly out at the power-house, could you?”