both dinners at the Ritz, so Peter could go in and make a speech to Judge Vandyne’s party.  Most of the friends had not come back from the lakes and the shore and their country homes, but were running into town for that one evening.  It was all the most delicious excitement, but—­oh, a place way down deep in me behind my excited breathing was so sore about Sam!  I couldn’t even think about his not being there, but I went on and danced and had a good time in sheer desperation.  Sam had to plow and hoe and reap and sow for food, while we ate and drank it and made merry!

Then the first night came, and everybody was there looking in high feather, and some of them wearing very low dress.  Judge Vandyne had taken all the boxes in the theater, and they were every one full to overflowing with loving excitement about Peter.  I was in the second box on the right-hand side of the stage at the front, and Peter sat in the shadow back of me.  Julia and one of Peter’s classmates were just behind us.  As the curtain went up Peter took a hard hold on my hand under my white chiffon scarf, and I heard him mutter under his breath: 

“Oh, Samboy!”

I am not going to try to describe that play of Peter’s.  The newspapers used all the adjectives and things there are in the English language to express enthusiasm with, and I haven’t got any left.  I will simply tell about it.

When Peter had gone out and buried himself in the shack on the hillside of The Briers, that looked out over the Harpeth Valley, he had unconsciously buried that frozen hero in “The Emergence” and had gone to work and resurrected him in a kind of Samuel Foster Crittenden.  Instead of being a complicated, heroic, erratic genius he was just a big, simple, strong young man who was doing his part in the corner of the world’s vineyard where he had been sent to work.  To help him Peter had written in a wonderful girl with a great deal of brains for one so young.  Just the sort of woman that men like Sam and the hero deserve to have.  She was so lovely that I caught my breath and—­and suffered.  But what made everybody in that theater laugh themselves happy was the essence of Hayesboro that Peter had distilled and poured into his characters.  Everybody was so mixed up with everybody else that nobody could feel sensitive or fail to enjoy every character.  I couldn’t tell whether I was the girl that practised tango steps all the time, even when the minister (who had manners like those of Colonel Menefee and the Mayor of Hayesboro) came to supper, or the girl that always had a plate of hickory-nut candy in her hand and kept saying sharp things while giving everybody something sweet to take away the taste.  Julia said she was that girl, but Peter indignantly denied anybody’s being anybody, and then we all kept still.  Just then the curtain went down on the second act, with the whole house in an uproar; and there was a call for Peter and Farrington.