“Well, she was very nice about my putting her into the story. It did rather stagger her at first—to know that I had been worshiping from afar, and grinding rhymes about her for a year without ever knowing her.”
“The enchantment wasn’t all a matter of distance, I hope,” the Poet persisted. “I wasn’t quite sure about her. She struck me as being a little bitter; seemed to think life a string of wrong numbers and the girl at the exchange stupid and cross. I should be sorry if you got any such notions from her; it couldn’t fail to make your ideal totter on its pedestal. It would be rough to find that your Pomona, in shaking the boughs in the orchard, was looking for an apple with a worm-mark in its damask cheek. It would argue for an unhappy nature. We must insist that our goddesses have a cheerful outlook; no grumbling when it rains on the picnic!”
“Well,” Fulton admitted, “she did seem a little disdainful and rather generally skeptical about things at first; but I met that by rather overemphasizing the general good that’s lying around everywhere, most of which I got from your books. Her father had lost his money, and her sister’s troubles couldn’t fail to spoil some of her illusions; but she’s going into her school-teaching with the right spirit. She’s been reading the manuscript of my story and has made some bully suggestions. I’ve rewritten one of the chapters and improved it vastly because she pointed out a place where I’d changed the key a little—I must have been tired when I wrote it. I’d rather got off the romantic note I started with and there were a dozen dead, pallid pages right in the middle of the thing.”
“She was afraid the romantic element flagged there?” asked the Poet carelessly.
“Well, I suppose that’s about what it came to. My heroine and the hero had a tiff; and I was giving the girl the best of it and making him out unreasonable; and she said she thought that wasn’t fair; that the trouble was all the girl’s fault. She thought the girl shouldn’t have been so peevish over a small matter when the young orchardist had shown himself chivalrous and generous. It seemed to be Miss Agnew’s idea that when you go in for romance you ought to carry through with it.”
The Poet’s attention seemed to wander, and he suppressed a smile with difficulty. He then began searching his pockets for something, and not finding it, remarked:—
“People who never change their minds aren’t interesting; they really are not.”
“Well, I’m glad enough to change mine,” replied Fulton, not knowing what was in the Poet’s mind; “and I hope I’ll never get to a place where I can’t take criticism in the right spirit.”
“Oh, I wasn’t thinking of you,” remarked the Poet.
He rose and moved quickly toward the door, as though to escape from Fulton’s renewed thanks for his kind offices in disposing of the verses.