LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE
[The so-called delicious, intangible joke][Frontispiece]
["Good enough!" he chuckled][14]
[Every girl like Cornelia had to go South sometime between November and March][33]
[An elderly dame][43]
[A much-freckled messenger-boy appeared dragging an exceedingly obstreperous fox-terrier][61]
["Well I'll be hanged," growled Stanton, "if I'm going to be strung by any boy!"][75]
[Some poor old worn-out story-writer][101]
["Maybe she is—'colored,'" he volunteered at last][113]
["Oh! Don't I look—gorgeous!" she stammered][138]
["What?" cried Stanton, plunging forward in his chair][159]
[Cornelia's mother answered this time][167]
[He unbuckled the straps of his suitcase and turned the cover backward on the floor][185]
["Are you a good boy?" she asked][205]
["It's only Carl," he said][207]

MOLLY MAKE-BELIEVE

I

The morning was as dark and cold as city snow could make it—a dingy whirl at the window; a smoky gust through the fireplace; a shadow black as a bear's cave under the table. Nothing in all the cavernous room, loomed really warm or familiar except a glass of stale water, and a vapid, half-eaten grape-fruit.

Packed into his pudgy pillows like a fragile piece of china instead of a human being Carl Stanton lay and cursed the brutal Northern winter.

Between his sturdy, restive shoulders the rheumatism snarled and clawed like some utterly frenzied animal trying to gnaw-gnaw-gnaw its way out. Along the tortured hollow of his back a red-hot plaster fumed and mulled and sucked at the pain like a hideously poisoned fang trying to gnaw-gnaw-gnaw its way in. Worse than this; every four or five minutes an agony as miserably comic as a crashing blow on one's crazy bone went jarring and shuddering through his whole abnormally vibrant system.