Timothy looked at her. “You couldn’t help writing one,” he said, and his eyes were full of something that blinded Patsy’s. “At first, when there was just Claire and you and me, it was a story of adventure—of wild and thrilling dashes into the preserve-closet, and raids upon the neighbors’ cherry trees; then”—his voice softened—“it was a fairy-story, the story of a wonderful new world, all dazzling and radiant with tender possibilities. Wasn’t it?” he insisted, gently. “Wasn’t it for a while a fairy-story, Little Sister?”
“For—for a while, yes,” acknowledged Patsy, very low, “but——”
“But the castles had to fall,” went on Timothy, gazing wistfully at Doromea’s gleaming ring, “the castles had to fall, and the Fairy Prince had to become just a Plain Husband, or he would never have fitted this Plain, Plain World; and the story had to become a real story—ten times more wonderful than a fairy-story, if one reads it with an eye to life’s permanent values. Do you know”—Timothy took off his glasses and looked at them meditatively—“we people who write things—that is, you and I and all the world—are simply pestered to death by false climaxes? Silly midget episodes jump up and insist that they—one after one—are the great Turning Point of all our Plot. Pats, my dear”—he regarded her seriously—“I make it a point not to believe ’em. I do really; I say to myself: here, if you, the Big You, can’t recognize your own theme and its outworking as you’ve planned it, as you want it, then you aren’t much of a writer, that’s all. If you want your story to end a certain way, and can’t make it end that way, just on account of the interference of some puny bit of an incident, I say, well, after all, Tim, you ought never to have been allowed to write. And so”—the gray eyes smiled deeper—“just out of self-respect I have to make the end right, you see.”
Patsy glanced at him suspiciously. “That’s a story with a moral,” she asserted, though her voice was rather unsteady; “the most impossible kind of all.”
“It is,” confessed the writer, unabashed, “a story with a moral. But I refuse to admit it’s impossible. And if you will go back again to those rattles, I think you’ll refuse to admit it too. The——”
“Why”—Patsy had turned and walked a few steps back into the store—“why, it’s Warren! Warren, Timothy—and——”
“His mother is over looking at necklaces,” nodded Timothy, modestly. “Not diamond ones, but still——”
“She heard me say I wanted some pearls for my birthday,” Patsy murmured, guiltily. “She—she’s got her bag with her. They can’t have gone up to the house yet—— Timmie, Timmie dear—do you—do you suppose I might speak to Warren, just to tell him not to mind the pincushion note, you know—as long as he’s looking at rattles, Timmie——?”
“As long as he’s looking at rattles,” agreed Timothy, judiciously, “I should say you might speak to him—yes.”
And as Patsy flew across the aisle, he deliberately turned his back and bent his glasses once more on engagement rings. “So foolish to let oneself fear that a Plain Story won’t end well,” he mused to the ring with the fine platinum claws; after all, he was only a writer.