If I had not decieved Jane things would be better.  But she was set on my sending the note.  So at last I wrote one on my visiting card, holding it so she could not read it.  Jane is my best friend and I am devoted to her, but she has no scruples about reading what is not meant for her.  I said: 

“Dear Mr. Egleston:  I think the Play is perfectly wonderfull.  And you are perfectly splendid in it.  It is perfectly terrable that it is going to stop.

“(Signed) The girl of the rose.”

I know that this seems bold.  But I did not feel bold, dear Dairy.  It was such a letter as any one might read, and contained nothing compromizing.  Still, I darsay I should not have written it.  But “out of the fulness of the Heart the mouth speaketh.”

I was shaking so much that I could not give it to the usher.  But Jane did.  However, I had sealed it up in an envelope.

Now comes the real surprize, dear Dairy.  For the usher came down and said Mr. Egleston hoped I would go back and see him after the act was over.  I think a paller must have come over me, and Jane said: 

“Bab!  Do you dare?”

I said yes, I dared, but that I would like a glass of water.  I seemed to be thirsty all the time.  So she got it, and I recovered my savoir fair, and stopped shaking.

I suppose Jane expected to go along, but I refrained from asking her.  She then said: 

“Try to remember everything he says, Bab.  I am just crazy about it.”

Ah, dear Dairy, how can I write how I felt when being led to him.  The entire seen is engraved on my Soul.  I, with my very heart in my eyes, in spite of my eforts to seem cool and collected.  He, in front of his mirror, drawing in the lines of starvation around his mouth for the next seen, while on his poor feet a valet put the raged shoes of Act II!

He rose when I entered, and took me by the hand.

“Well!” he said.  “At last!”

He did not seem to mind the valet, whom he treated like a chair or table.  And he held my hand and looked deep into my eyes.

Ah, dear Dairy, Men may come and Men may go in my life, but never again will I know such ecstacy as at that moment.

“Sit down,” he said.  “Little Lady of the rose—­but it’s violets today, isn’t it?  And so you like the Play?”

I was by that time somwhat calmer, but glad to sit down, owing to my knees feeling queer.

“I think it is magnifacent,” I said.

“I wish there were more like you,” he observed.  “Just a moment, I have to make a change here.  No need to go out.  There’s a screan for that very purpose.”

He went behind the screan, and the man handed him a raged shirt over the top of it, while I sat in a chair and dreamed.  What I reflected, would the School say if it but knew!  I felt no remorce.  I was there, and beyond the screan, changing into the garments of penury, was the only member of the Other Sex I had ever felt I could truly care for.