"I love it! I love it!" Molly kept repeating to herself. "There couldn't be anything more perfect than college. Oh, do I have to give it up?"
"Hey, Miss Molly!" called Andy McLean in a nearby seat, while Judy and Nance and George Theodore Green were waving violently to her, and Lawrence Upton was shaking hands with her and assuring her that the dinner had been a failure because she hadn't been there. Fortunately, Judith was well out of ear-shot behind the scenes. The Williams sisters, from across the aisle, were calling in one voice:
"Molly, come and meet our brother John."
Margaret Wakefield, causing a sensation with her distinguished father, and enduring the gaze of the entire audience with the calmness of one reared in the public eye, detained her for a moment to introduce her to the famous politician.
"A real belle," said Miss Grace Green to her brother, leaning across two seats to speak to him, "is one who is just as popular with women as with men, and Miss Molly Brown of Kentucky appears to be a general favorite."
The Professor looked at his sister absently. Apparently, he hadn't heard a word she said.
He was saying to himself:
"I think I'll let the tenor sing that little lyric that begins: 'Eyes like the skies in summer.'"
After a while the delightful affair was over, and Molly, feeling immensely happy in spite of her anxious heart, had been escorted to Queen's. Professor Edwin Green, hastening into his room, flung his hat in one direction and his coat in another, and sat down at his desk. Without an instant's hesitation, he seized a pencil and the first scrap of paper he found and began to write:
"Dear Richard:
"I know that your cares are many, but get to work on the score of the opera. I find that by working at night for a week I shall be able to finish the last act and make all the changes you suggested. We must launch the thing now. I have overcome all scruples, as you called them, and I want nothing more than to get the opera into some manager's hands. If you think that Blum & Starks will take it up, you had better see them at once. My name may be used and everything that goes with it in the way of previous unimportant literary efforts. It's unusual, of course, for a Professor of English Literature to write a comic opera, but the very unusualness may give it some publicity and help the thing along. I have made one change without conferring; given the tenor-lover the baritone-villain's song: 'Eyes like the skies in summer.' Write something very pretty for that, will you, old man? The money we may make on this will help some in the present critical family situation. I understand that there have been a good many failures in light opera this winter, and the managers are looking for good things. It may be that we shall strike at the psychological moment.
"Yours, E. G."