"But if you join us, hadn't you better go back to your maiden name?" inquired Lillie.
"Perhaps so," said Frank Maddox thoughtfully. "My pen-name does sound odd under the peculiar circumstances. On the other hand to revert to Laura Spragg now might be indiscreet. People would couple my name with Frank Maddox's—you know the way of the world. The gossips get their facts so distorted, and I couldn't even deny the connection."
"But of course you have had your romance?" asked Lillie. "You know one romance per head is our charge for admission?"
"Oh, yes! I have had my romance. In three vols. Shall I tell it you?"
"If you please."
"Listen, then. Volume the First: Frank Maddox is in her study. Outside the sun is setting in furrows of gold-laced sagging storm-clouds, dun and——"
"Oh, please, I always skip that," laughed Lillie. "I know that two lovers cannot walk in a lane without the author seeing the sunset, which is the last thing in the world the lovers see. But when the sky begins to look black, I always begin to skip."
"Forgive me. I didn't mean to do it. Remember I'm an habitual art-critic. I thought I was describing a harmony of Whistler's or a movement from a sonata. It shall not occur again. To the heroine enter the hero—shabby, close-cropped, pale. Their eyes meet. He is thunderstruck to find the heroine a woman; blushes, stammers, and offers to go away. Struck by something of innate refinement in his manner, she presses him to avow the object of his visit. At last, in dignified language, infinitely touching in its reticence, he confesses he called on Mr. Frank Maddox, the writer he admires so much, to ask a little pecuniary help. He is starving. Original, isn't it, to have your hero hungry in the first chapter? He speaks vaguely of having ambitions which, unless he goes under in the struggle for existence may some day be realized. There are so many men in London like that. However, the heroine is moved by his destitute condition and sitting down to her desk, she writes out a note, folds it up and gives it to him. 'There!' she says, 'there's a prescription against starvation.' 'But how am I to take it?' he asked. 'It must be taken before breakfast, the first thing in the morning,' she replied, 'to the editor of the Moon. Give him the note; he will change it for you. Don't mention my name.'
"There's a prescription against starvation."