Jane Raleigh came over to see me the day after I came home, and I read her some of the Love seens.  She posatively wept with excitement.

“Bab,” she said, “if any man, no matter who, ever said those things to me, I’d go straight into his arms.  I couldn’t help it.  Whose going to act in it?”

“I think I’ll have Robert Edeson, or Richard Mansfield.”

“Mansfield’s dead,” said Jane.

“Honestly?”

“Honest he is.  Why don’t you get some of these moveing picture actors?  They never have a chance in the Movies, only acting and not talking.”

Well, that sounded logicle.  And then I read her the place where the cruel first husband comes back and finds her married again and happy, and takes the Children out to drown them, only he can’t because they can swim, and they pull him in instead.  The curtain goes down on nothing but a few bubbles rising to mark his watery Grave.

Jane was crying.

“It is too touching for words, Bab!” she said.  “It has broken my heart.  I can just close my eyes and see the Theater dark, and the stage almost dark, and just those bubbles coming up and breaking.  Would you have to have a tank?”

“I darsay,” I replied dreamily.  “Let the other people worry about that.  I can only give them the material, and hope that they have intellagence enough to grasp it.”

I think Sis must have told Carter Brooks something about the trouble I was in, for he brought me a box of Candy one afternoon, and winked at me when mother was not looking.

“Don’t open it here,” he whispered.

So I was forced to controll my impatience, though passionately fond of Candy.  And when I got to my room later, the box was full of cigarettes.  I could have screamed.  It just gave me one more thing to hide, as if a man’s suit and shirt and so on was not suficient.

But Carter paid more attention to me than he ever had before, and at a tea dance sombody had at the Country Club he took me to one side and gave me a good talking to.

“You’re being rather a bad child, aren’t you?” he said.

“Certainly not.”

“Well, not bad, but—­er—­naughty.  Now see here, Bab, I’m fond of you, and you’re growing into a mightey pretty girl.  But your whole Social Life is at stake.  For heaven’s sake, at least until you’re married, cut out the cigarettes and booze.”

That cut me to the heart, but what could I say?

Well, July came, and we had rented a house at Little Hampton and everywhere one went one fell over an open trunk or a barrell containing Silver or Linen.

Mother went around with her lips moving as if in prayer, but she was realy repeating lists, such as sowing basket, table candles, headache tablets, black silk stockings and tennis rackets.