“No, don’t,” plead Mae; “please don’t laugh at the little girl me.  I love to think of her as so goody-goody.  Last night,” and Mae lowered her voice, “I seemed to see little Mae Madden kneeling down in the old nursery in her woolly wrapper saying her prayers,” and Mae brought up on the prayers very abruptly, and bent over toward the sand and began to draw hastily.  “Here comes nine-year-old Mae.  Mr. Mann, you may do the describing.”

“O, I suppose there were doll’s parties, first valentines, and rides with Albert in his buggy, when you clung very tightly to the slight arm of the carriage and smiled very bravely up in his face.  You must have been pretty then.”

“No, I was dreadfully ugly.  I had broken out two teeth climbing a stone wall.”

“You had stopped being good?”

“Yes, that only lasted a little bit of a time.”

“Miss Mae, I’m sure you were never ugly, but naughty and silly, I dare say.  Kept a diary now, didn’t you?”

“Yes, and went to sleep with Eliza Cooke’s poems under my pillow every night, and my finger holding the book open at some such thrilling verse as this: 

’Say on that I’m over romantic
In loving the wild and the free,
But the waves of the dashing Atlantic,
The Alps and the eagle for me.’”

“Did you wear your hair plaited when you were ten years old?” enquired Norman, intensely busy with another drawing.

“O no; I didn’t do anything when I was ten years old but get mad and make up with my two dearest friends.”

“One of whom was your dearest friend one-half of the time and the other the rest of it, I suppose.”

“Don’t be satirical, sir.  I had a lover when I was eleven; I used to skate with him and write him little notes, folded very queerly.”

“Why do you draw twelve and thirteen with their heads down?” asked Mae, after a moment.

“Because they read so much; everything they can get hold of, including, possibly, a very revised edition of ’Arabian Nights’?”

“Yes,” laughed Mae, “and my first novel, ‘Villette.’”

“You go to a play for the first time now,” suggested Norman.  “How you clasp your hands and wink your eyes and bite your lips!  And next day, in front of your mother’s pier-glass, how you scream ‘O, my love,’ and gasp and tumble over in a heap in your brown calico, as the grand lady did the night before, in her pink silk.”

“Brown calico, indeed!  I never condescended to die in my own clothes, let me assure you.  The garret was overhauled, and had been since I was a mere baby, for effective, sweeping garments.  Let us hurry along over fourteen and fifteen.  I was sentimental and tried to be so young-ladyish then.  I used to read history with Albert, and always put on both my gloves when I started out, and had great horror of girls who talked loud in the street.  I learned to make bread, and shirt bosoms, and such things.”