“I write Dad and Mother every night. They’ve been out here in the car several times. Rosalind motored out Sunday. We had an awfully good time.
“Don’t you want to come up before we strike our tents and beat it for the Bronx?
“Yours contentedly,
“Betsy B.
“P. S.—I forgot to say that your little protégée, Eris, does extremely well whatever is required of her. She plays one of those self-conscious rustics, half educated, vain, credulous, and with a capacity for a world of mischief. I’m a pig, I suppose, but I’m glad Crystal Gray cut the part to slivers. Eris has no experience and no training, of course, but she screens well, is intelligent, and does exactly what Frank Donnell tells her to do.
“She comes, diffidently, to sit in my hammock with me after dinner, and curls up like a tired kitten. But, like a kitten, she is receptive, responsive, ready to play or be talked to—an unspoiled, generous nature already actively forming a character the daily development of which is very interesting to watch.
“I told her I was writing to you. She asks, very shyly, to be ‘faithfully remembered.’
“I, also, but not faithfully.
“Betsy.”
CHAPTER XII
A SHORT story every Sunday would have grilled the brains out of anybody, even a born story-teller.