And lying on the beach Dolly could pursue her shell stories in the loveliest fashion, the best of materials to hand, and no fear of laughing detection.
On the crisp sand she drew her houses with all their different rooms, and placed in them her shell [183] ]inhabitants. One of the shells, a pretty bluish grey, was always “Mary,” a model eldest sister; a tiny smooth scallop, snow-white, was “Muriel,” who used to be chiefly occupied in dying. And a very bright, brown, thin one with black, irregular markings on it was always “Judy.”
[185]
]PART II
SCRIBBLING DAYS
[187]
]CHAPTER XVII
RHYME AND RHYTHM
“I know of no sweeter emotion, and hardly of a greater one, than when a young man takes a sheaf of paper in his hand and, striding about his room, boldly resolves to turn it into MS.”—Jean Paul Richter.
In after years, when two of her little maids were actually among the army of the makers of books, Mrs. Conway used often to try to recollect what had been their earliest essay with a pen.
So far as her memory served, it was Dolly who first made the great plunge at the age of ten or eleven.
The child was shy with her for three or four days, hung about her in odd, half-ashamed nervousness burdened with her secret. Finally she crept up close and hid her face on an arm that was busily engaged cutting out pinafores for Weenie.
“I’ve—I’ve written something, mama,” she whispered, pink as a peony.
The scissors went snip, snip, snip along the edge of the pattern.