"Yes, but it came to her through her father. Remember, I was a second wife. I had no children. My husband gave me the Cambridge place and left this to his son."
"What became of the Cambridge house?"
"Sold, years ago. Eaten up. Seems as if I'd done nothing, all these years, but eat. It makes me sick to think of it. Well, here was I, credit low, my little knack at writing all but gone—why, Billy, styles have changed since my day. Folks would hoot at my novels now. They don't read them. They just remember I wrote them when they want a celebrity at a tea. I'm a back number. Don't you know it?"
He nodded, gravely pondering. The one thing about him never to be affected by his whimsical humor was the integrity of a business verdict. Madam Fulton now was warming to the value of her own position. She began to see how picturesque it was.
"Well, then up rises one of your precious publishers and says to me, 'Mrs. Fulton, you have known all the celebrated people. Why not write your recollections?' 'Why not?' says I. Well, I went home and sat down and wrote. And when I looked back at my life, I found it dull. So I gave myself a free hand. I described the miserable thing as it ought to have been, not as it was."
William Stark was leaning forward, looking her in the face, his hands on his knees, as if to steady him through an amazing crisis.
"Florrie," he began, "do you mean to say you made up most of the letters in that book?"
"Most of them? Every one! I hadn't any letters from celebrities. Days when I might have had, I didn't care a button about the eggs they were cackling over, and I didn't know they were going to be celebrities, then, did I?"
"Do you mean the recollections of Brook Farm, taken down from the lips of the old poet as he had it from a member of the fraternity there—"
"Faked, dear boy, faked, every one of them." She was gathering cheerfulness by the way.