In order to come as close to him as possible she did the next best thing. She sat down at her table and wrote a long letter to Marian, telling her everything she could think of that would interest her. Then she re-read with extreme care the letter she had found at the Post Office that day in reply to the one she had written Marian purporting to come from an admirer. Writing slowly and thinking deeply, she answered it. She tried to imagine that she was Peter Morrison and she tried to say the things in that letter that she thought Peter would say in the circumstances, because she felt sure that Marian would be entertained by such things as Peter would say. When she finished, she read it over carefully, and then copied it with equal care on the typewriter, which she had removed to her workroom.
When she heard Katy’s footstep outside her door, she opened it and drew her in, slipping the bolt behind her. She led her to the fireplace and recited the lines.
“Now ain’t they jist the finest gentlemen?” said Katy. “Cut right off of a piece of the same cloth as your father. Now some way we must get together enough money to get ye a good-sized rug for under your work table, and then ye’ve got to have two bits of small ones, one for your hearthstone and one for your aisel; and then ye’re ready, colleen, to show what ye can do. I’m so proud of ye when I think of the grand secret it’s keepin’ for ye I am; and less and less are gettin’ me chances for the salvation of me soul, for every night I’m a-sittin’ starin’ at the magazines ye gave me when I ought to be tellin’ me beads and makin’ me devotions. Ain’t it about time the third was comin’ in?”
“Any day now,” said Linda in a whisper. “And, Katy, you’ll be careful? That editor must think that ‘Jane Meredith’ is full of years and ripe experience. I probably wouldn’t get ten cents, no not even a for-nothing chance, if he knew those articles were written by a Junior.”
“Junior nothing!” scoffed Katy. “There was not a day of his life that your pa did not spend hours drillin’ ye in things the rest of the girls in your school never heard of. ’Tain’t no high-school girl that’s written them articles. It’s Alexander Strong speakin’ through the medium of his own flesh and blood.”
“Why, so it is, Katy!” cried Linda delightedly. “You know, I never thought of that. I have been so egoistical I thought I was doing them myself.”
“Paid ye anything yet?” queried Katy.
“No,” said Linda, “they haven’t. It seems that the amount of interest the articles evoke is going to decide what I am to be paid for them, but they certainly couldn’t take the recipe and the comments and the sketch for less than twenty-five or thirty dollars, unless recipes are like poetry. Peter said the other day that if a poet did not have some other profession to support him, he would starve to death on all he was paid for writing the most beautiful things that ever are written in all this world. Peter says even an effort to write a poem is a beautiful thing.”
“Well, maybe that used to be the truth,” said Katy as she started toward the door, “but I have been reading some things labeled ‘poetry’ in the magazines of late, and if the holy father knows what they mean, he’s even bigger than ever I took him to be.”
“Katy,” said Linda, “we are dreadful back numbers. We are letting this world progress and roll right on past us without a struggle. We haven’t either one been to a psycho-analyst to find out the colour of our auras.”