"Is that so? Warren Mason is considered one of the finest newspaper men in the city. All the fellows look up to him."
"I'm glad I met him. O, now I see! Dr. Herrick invited him there to hear me read. I made a failure, I'm afraid."
She thought so more and more as the rose color of her little triumph grew gray. She ended by tossing to and fro on her bed, raging to think how foolishly she had acted. The long poem was bad, she saw it now. It was involved and twisted and dull. She saw Mason's face darken again, and it seemed now it wore a look of disgust.
And the whistling! Good heavens, was there no limit to her folly, her childishness?
So she writhed and groaned, her hopes all pathetically trampled and dust-covered now. Everybody would hear of her idiocy. She had been so determined to do something worth while, and she had read her worst lines, and whistled—whistled like a cow-boy.
The houses of the Lake Shore seemed like impenetrable castles in the deep of her despair, and Mason's words about the city grew each moment deeper in meaning.
After Rose left, Dr. Herrick came back into the room radiant.
"There, what do you think of her? Am I crazy or not? I claim to have discovered a genius."
"My dear, seems to me Thatcher has a prior claim."