I rushed out into the front yard. The tree-tops were misty with that white fog which looks as if darkness were trailing her nightrobe behind her; and already on the neighboring lawns the automatic sprinklers were caroming across the green as if they had St. Vitus' dance.
"On a day like this nothing is too good to be true!" I decided, as I picked up the paper and scurried back into the house.
"And got your name to it—Grace Chalmers Christie!" mother wailed in despair, as she opened the sheet and saw two columns, broken by a face that could do much more sensible things than "launch a thousand ships and burn the topless towers of Ilium."
"Let's—see," I suggested, peering over her shoulder and watching the words dancing up and down on either side of this face. I couldn't read anything, but I managed to catch an occasional "Macdermott" as it pranced along in front of an occasional "model cottage."
"Take it!—Burn it!" mother commanded, after she had read enough to realize that the thing was entirely too dull to prove interesting to any feminine creature.
She thrust it into my hand, and I took it into my bedroom, where I began a frenzied search for the scissors.
"I'd rather have you by yourself—away from all suggestions of Macdermotts and enlarged traction companies," I whispered, snipping the picture from the page and laying it caressingly in the drawer of the old-fashioned desk.
There it lay all morning—and I whispered to it and caressed it.
"A picture in a drawer is worth two on the wall," I said once, as I pushed it away quickly to keep mother from seeing it. But the fun of the secret was not at all times uppermost.
"You are so beautiful—so beautiful," I wailed, as I looked at it another time. "I almost wish you were not—so beautiful."