“I am afraid you don’t,” she said, the smile leaving her lips. “The fact that you are here on the errand you have charged yourself with proves that.”
“I am not aware,” I said, “that I have come on any particularly ridiculous errand. May I ask you what you mean by the expression ‘most amusing of them all’? Am I one among many, and, if so, one what among many what?”
“Your errand is a good one,” she said, gravely, “and not at all ridiculous; let me assure you that I appreciate that fact. Your question I will answer by asking another: Are you here of your own volition, or has Stuart Harley created you, as he did Messrs. Osborne, Parker, and the Professor? Are you my new hero, or what?”
The question irritated me. This woman was not content with interfering seriously with my friend’s happiness: she was actually attributing me to him, casting doubts upon my existence, and placing me in the same category with herself—a mere book creature. To a man who regards himself as being the real thing, flesh and blood, and, well, eighteen-carat flesh and blood at that, to be accused of living only a figmentary existence is too much. I retorted angrily.
“If you consider me nothing more than an idea, you do not manifest your usual astuteness,” I said.
Her reply laid me flat.
“I do not consider you anything of the sort. I never so much as associated you with anything resembling an idea. I merely asked a question,” she said. “I repeat it. Do you or do you not exist? Are you a bit of the really real or a bit of Mr. Harley’s realism? In short, are you here at Profile Lake, walking and talking with me, or are you not?”
A realizing sense of my true position crept over me. In reality I was not there talking to her, but in my den in New York writing about her. I may not be a realist, but I am truthful. I could not deceive her, so I replied, hesitatingly:
“Well, Miss Andrews, I am—no, I am not here, except in spirit.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said, demurely. “And do you exist somewhere, or is this a ‘situation’ calculated to delight the American girl—with pin-money to spend on Messrs. Herring, Beemer, & Chadwick’s publications?”