Madeline worked on her play with the furious industry of the “digs” she had always ridiculed. The floor of her room was littered with dusty sheets of manuscript, which she mysteriously informed her landlady must not be touched, or “the world and all would be lost.” She took long, solitary walks, sat for hours at her desk or the Tally-ho’s, alternately staring hopelessly into space, or frantically covering reams of papers with her pretty illegible writing. Occasionally she emerged from her closely-guarded solitude and gave a tea-drinking for the B. C. A.’s, at which she adroitly turned the conversation to the strangest topics; or she bundled some long-suffering friend off with her on an endless shopping tour or trolley ride, during which she listened in complete absorption to chance bits of dialogue, coming home with a delicious new monologue for which she insisted on an immediate audience, “to test the note of reality,” she explained vaguely.
One day just before Christmas she was caught by Mary Brooks in a mellow mood and dragged off to dinner, to give Dr. Hinsdale a practical demonstration of some of the idiosyncrasies of genius. And after Dr. Hinsdale had gone to his study, over the second round of coffee by the open fire, she explained her newest literary device to the bewildered Mary.
“When I do stunty pageants for my friends to act and footless little playlets that don’t matter,” she began, “I just dash them off without thinking and they turn out beautifully. But somehow the idea of writing seriously for publication stiffens me all up inside and muddles my ideas. Heroine always turns into a freak or a prig on my hands. Hero gets hysterical when I try to make him earnest. But now when things begin to go wrong, I calmly tear up what I’ve written, and go out and make my little pals talk off the next scene to me, or at least recall to my mind how real conversation sounds. The awfully romantic, lover-y parts I either have to overhear or extract from people who don’t know me. The girl at Cannon’s who is the model for my heartless coquette little guesses her proud mission in life.”
“I should call that just cold-blooded cribbing,” declared Mary indignantly.
“Cold-blooded cribbing from life is the very top notch of art,” Madeline assured her. “My play is a slice from life. I suppose it’s because I’m young and inexperienced that I have to keep stopping to refer to life so often as I go along.”
“Am I in it anywhere?” demanded Mary eagerly.
“You and the girl at Cannon’s and Fluffy Dutton and Betty are the principal ingredients in the heroine,” explained Madeline. “But I defy you to have discovered it for yourself, and I swear you to eternal secrecy, because people would misunderstand. Life with a big ‘L’ is the kind I’m cribbing; I should scorn, of course, to put my friends and their petty affairs into a play.”
Mary drew her smooth brows into a puzzled frown. “I suppose I shall understand all that when I see the play,” she said with a sigh. “George Garrison Hinsdale would better be saving up for a trip to New York before long, including a box party to the first night of your slice from life.”
“You’ll have to wait till the second night if you want a box,” Madeline told her calmly. “All the boxes are spoken for on the first night, and there will be several parties in the seats, besides.”
This calm assumption of success made Mary gasp and engage her husband, later in the evening, in an intricate discussion of the distinction between the serene self-assurance of genius and the ordinary man’s unjustified conceit.