Pretty soon it was time to go home. Molly found herself in the carriage, trying to listen politely to the ceaseless flow of Miss Petit's conversation, while she wrapped her old, gray eider-down cape about her and thought and thought. Suddenly the words of Madeleine Petit pierced her troubled mind.
"Do you write, Miss Brown? I wish I could. I'd like to try for some of the prizes for short stories. Think of winning a thousand dollars for one story! Wouldn't it be glorious? Then, there are some advertisement prizes, too. One for five hundred dollars; think of that! I always cut out every one I see, meaning to compete, but I never do. It isn't in my line, you see. I'm going to major in mathematics."
Molly smiled that the dainty little creature should have chosen that hated subject for her life's work.
"You say you saved the clippings about prizes?" she asked when they had reached Madeleine's lodging.
"Oh, yes; I have them all in my room. Would you like to see some of them? Tell the man to wait, and I'll bring them down."
Molly reached Queen's that night before the other girls, and hastening to the student's lamp, she proceeded to look over the clippings.
One was from a leading woman's magazine; one from a magazine of short stories; several from advertising firms—the best jingle about a stove polish; the best catchy phrase about a laundry soap; the best advertisement in verse or prose for a real estate company which had purchased an entire mountain and was engaged in erecting numbers of Swiss chalets for summer residents. The pictures of these pretty little houses were very attractive. Many of them had poetical names. One of them, called "The Chalet of the West Wind," occupied the centre of the page. From its broad gallery could be seen a long vista of valley, flanked by mountain ranges.
"What a charming place!" thought Molly, and that night she went to bed with the "Chalet of the West Wind" so deeply photographed in her mind that she almost felt as if she had been there herself. She could see it perched on the side of the mountain, looking across the valley. It was at the very edge of the forest. The picture showed that, and in her imagination she scented the wild flowers that must grow at its feet in the springtime. No doubt the west wind, which symbolized health and happiness, fair weather and sunshine, blew softly through its open casements and across its spacious galleries.
She went to sleep dreaming of the "Chalet of the West Wind," and in the morning something throbbed in her pulses. It was a kind of muffled pounding at first, like the beginning of a long distance call, "lumpty-tum-tum; lumpty-tum-tum." But gradually a poem took shape in her mind, and as the fragments came to her she wrote them down on scraps of paper and hid them carefully in her desk.