“Anne—clever?” Doromea stumbled, dazed with the dawning of it. “Why—why, Michael!”
“Yes”—Michael was standing up now, and almost excited—“yes, those were Anne’s things—the clever ones—and all the rest was rot. We sat in there racking our brains over subtle things to say, and all the time, if we’d just listened to Anne, we could have written a perfectly extraordinary book—the cleverest book in the world! It’s maddening—it’s——”
“Do you know why it would have been the cleverest book in the world?” asked Timothy, quietly—for Anne’s singing stopped just then. “Because it would have been the story of just a plain, ordinary woman—and that’s the rarest woman one can find to write about—women like Anne, and that little Patsy sister of mine, and a host of others. Why don’t you go in,” he said to Michael, gently, “and ask her to help you find her?”
As Michael slipped through the long window, Timothy moved to the step below Doromea. “Aren’t you convinced that she’s the subtlest woman, too—this plain, ordinary woman?” he asked. Doromea’s curly head was bent very low. “Don’t you think you might like to cook, and sew, and trim hats sometimes?”
His voice was so wistful that Doromea wiped her eyes quite frankly this time. “I—I am perfectly wild to trim hats,” she burst out, laughing between her sobs. “Oh, Timothy, I am so sick—sick—sick of trying to be clever and think up things! I am really the dullest, plainest woman in the world.”
“I hope so,” said Timothy, gravely, taking the unskilful little hands. “I need a heroine most awfully. You see”—turning her about to face the library windows—“Michael has found his.” For Michael was standing by, while Anne lit the lamp and undid a heavy pile of manuscript.
“Anne—just a plain woman——” Doromea’s voice caught—but with a yearning desire. “Even Gladys-Marie had the sense to tell me that she had the Duchess heroines beat by a lope! Do you suppose, Timothy”—her hands crept to his shoulders pleadingly—“do you suppose that I can ever learn to be as clever as Anne?”
II
TIMOTHY—ONLY A WRITER
Patsy thumped Timothy’s fattest yellow cushion viciously. “It’s all very well for you to sit there and smile,” she scolded her pretty stepmother. “Dad was always perfect to you, and Timmie—if he is my brother—is a joy to keep house for. You’ve never known what it is to live with a man from Boston!—oh, how I hate him, how I’d like to make him fairly eat slang! The idea—my own husband saying I was r-rowdy, and—and tomboy,” Patsy’s head went down into the yellow cushion, “and before my own mother-in-law, too, just because I slid down the banisters! Ugh!”
The stepmother looked at Patsy’s lovely rebellious little head. Then she looked at the ridiculous scrap of a frock she was making. “I suppose he thought of the Angel,” she murmured.