Ever a talented imitator, she next tried her hand at an essay on an abstract subject. This was a failure: you could not SEE things, when you wrote about, say, "Beneficence"; and Laura's thinking was done mainly in pictures. Matters were still worse when she tinkered at Cupid's especial genre: her worthless little incident stared at her, naked and scraggy, from the sheet; she had no wealth of words at her disposal in which to deck it out. So, with a sigh, she turned back to the advice Cupid had given her, and prepared to make a faithful transcript of actuality. She called what she now wrote: "A Day at School", and conscientiously set down detail on detail; so fearful, this time, of over-brevity, that she spun the account out to twenty pages; though the writing of it was as distasteful to her as her reading of A DOLL'S HOUSE had been.
At the subsequent meeting of the Society, expression of opinion was not lacking.
"Oh, Jehoshaphat! How much more?"
"Here, let me get out. I've had enough."
"I say, you forgot to count how many steps it took you to come downstairs."
Till the chairman had pity on the embarrassed author and said: "Look here, Laura, I think you'd better keep the rest for another time."
"It was just what you told me to do," Laura reproached Cupid that night: she was on the brink of tears.
But Cupid was disinclined to shoulder the responsibility. "Told you to be as dull and long-winded as that? Infant, it's a whacker!"
"But it was TRUE what I wrote—every word of it."
Neither of the two elder girls was prepared to discuss this vital point. Cupid shifted ground. "Good Lord, Laura, but it's hard to drive a thing into YOUR brain-pan.—You don't need to be ALL true on paper, silly child!"