Ah! that bare little room! So tidy! With faded discolored wall paper and a scrubbed pine floor! With its battered iron bed! There's an old table by the one window with a child's silver mug and plate and spoon on it, each of them with a great bee carved upon it. That's all there is in that room save a low chair and a superb but shabby walnut bureau.
"She loved it so much that she wouldn't change it when she was building Octavia House over—"
"Octavia House!" I cried. "Why, that's that queer house where all the young geniuses live! The one that the Peter Alden money built—"
"It's not a queer house!" the girl defied me. "It's—it's this house! And you can't say Money built this house! Money couldn't have done it! Not all the money in the world, couldn't! It wasn't Money! It was— Pride! Not the sort of pride that goeth before _de_struction but that mightier pride that goeth before _con_struction! No, no!" she murmured vehemently, "it wasn't Money! It was really almost done before the money came! And she didn't just build the house over, she built all of us over. And built the whole world over for us all. Just with her pride in us! Just with the pride she made us feel in ourselves! And do you know, we were all such self-centered idiots, that it wasn't until after she was gone that we grasped what she'd done with us? We didn't know the glory and the wonder of her until after she was gone—"
"She's not—?"
The Sculptor Girl answered my half-asked question almost ferociously.
"Of course she's not dead! She is the alivest person in this whole world—aliver than you or I can ever be! And yet,—we've lost her. She isn't just ours any more. And when she was blessedly, absolutely just ours—we didn't appreciate her. You see, she was so frumpy and absurd and quiet we didn't think about her—we scarcely saw her. But oh—the minute when we did see her! It came in a flash for me! I just knew, all of a sudden, that she was perfectly beautiful—as beautiful as her own whistle—her lovely, lovely Mademoiselle Folly whistle—"
"Oh! Oh!" I gasped, "You can't mean that she was—is—Mademoiselle
Folly?"
"Mean it? Didn't you know it? Didn't you ever hear her whistle? Oh, even now that she's gone it seems to me that I can still hear her whistling! And no matter what any one has said about it—they couldn't all of them, put together, say half enough—not even if they all said things as gushy as the Poetry Girl—she said it was like water trickling in a moonlit fountain! I only know it's like what I tried to put into my little Pandora—that it was like what Barrie was thinking when he let Peter Pan cry, 'I'm Joy! Joy! Joy!'—Even the Painter Boy, who has a silly pose that he hates music, used to hang around to hear her whistle—he pretended he was just looking at her so's he could paint her, but that didn't fool me—Listen, there's Nor' stumping up stairs now—he's awfully lame on these rainy days and that moody—"
"Do you mean Noralla? The one who did 'The Spirit of Romance'? Does he live here?"