"But, it's just like," she said, when half way through it. "I had no idea what you were thinking of."
"I know you didn't," said Jimmie with a grin. "I didn't myself. Now read your own."
She glanced eagerly over it, and for a moment Jimmie was sorry, sorry that the will to write had come to her. For Augusta would be a terrible critic upon herself. Immediately he saw the frown of the artist's discontent with her work clouding her face. Augusta was too clever not to see the raw and badly tooled places in her own work just as she saw them in his work. And Jimmie thought of several men whom he knew, fairly successful as writers, too, who never knew this discontent, who could sit down and gloat over everything they wrote, fatuously thinking it all good merely because it was theirs. Augusta had gone farther in this afternoon than those men had progressed in years. He counted the cost for her and knew what she would suffer from her own sensitive and merciless judgment. Nevertheless, he knew, with a sort of helpless fatalism, that he would not now try to stop her.
"Now," he said, handing her the finished product which he had made from her work and his, "here is the impudence. It's for you to tear it up or let it stand."
She took it without a question and began to read carefully, while Jimmie stood by waiting for the verdict. He felt that Augusta had every right to be hurt by his ruthlessly grabbing and mutilating to his own purposes her first little heart-wrung work. But he soon saw from her hurrying breath and shining eyes that he had not done wrong.
At the end, she jumped up and hugged him, crying:
"It's fine, Jimmie! And it's yours and mine! Ours!"
After a little Jimmie said:
"Yes, the spiteful relatives may say that it has its great uncle's red hair and that they can't imagine where it gets its good looks from anyway, but it's ours."
Augusta hid her face in the general region of Jimmie's vest pocket, and when she finally looked up the change of subject was complete.