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“Yes: I know,” I broke in. “Very good. I’m the goat. Lying, hypocrisy, false pretense, fake charity; it’s all one to a sin-seared old reprobate like me. After it’s over I’ll go around the corner and steal what pennies I can find in Blind Simon’s cup, just to make me feel comparatively respectable and decent again.”

It was no easier than I expected it to be, especially when little Mayme, having come to say good-bye, put her lips close to my ear and tried to whisper something, and cried and kissed me instead.

Our Square was a dimmer and duller place after she left. But her letters helped. They were so exactly like herself! Even at the first, when things seemed to be going ill with her, they were all courage, and quaint humor and determination to get well and come back to Our Square, which was the dearest and best place in the world with the dearest and best people in it. Homesickness! Poor little, lonely Mayme. She was reading–she wrote the Bonnie Lassie–all the books that the Dominie had listed for her, and she was being tutored by a school-teacher with blue goggles and a weak heart who lived at the same resort. “Why grow up a Boob,” wrote the philosophic Mayme, “when the lil old world is full of wise guys just aking to spill their wiseness?”

Contemporaneously the Weeping Scion of Wealth was writing back his views on life and the emptiness thereof, in better orthography, but with distinctly less of spirit.

“It appears,” reported the Little Red Doctor, “that every man in his own company has licked our young friend and now the other companies of the regiment are beginning to show interest, and he doesn’t like it. I believe he’d desert if it weren’t that he’s afraid of what Mayme would think.”

“Still on his mind, is she?” I asked.

The Little Red Doctor produced a letter with a camp postmark from the South and read a passage:

“You were right when you guessed that I never wanted anything very much before, without having it handed to me. Perhaps you are right about its being good for me. But it comes hard. The promise goes, of course. I’m going to show you and her that I’m not yellow. [So that was still rankling; salutary, if bitter dose!] But if this war ever finishes, all bets are off and I’m coming back to find her. And don’t you forget your part of the bargain, to write and let me know how she is getting on.” The Little Red Doctor was able to send progressively encouraging news. When the cold weather came, Mayme moved westward to Southern California, and found herself on the edge of one of the strange, tumultuous, semi-insane moving-picture colonies of that region. Thence issued, presently, stirring tidings.

“What do you think?” wrote our exile. “They’ve got my funny little monkey mug in the movies. Five per and steady work. The director likes me and says he will give me a real chance one of these days. But, as the Dominie would say, this is a hell of a place. [Graceless imp!] I would not say it myself, because I am a perfect lady. You have to be, out here. That reminds me: I have cut out the Mayme. Every fresh little frizzle in the colony with a false front and a pneumatic figure calls herself Mayme or Daisye or Tootsye. Not for me! I am keeping up my lessons and trying to make my head good for something besides carrying a switch. Tell the Little Red Doctor that it is so long since I coughed I have forgotten how. And I love you all so hard that it hurts.

“Your loving

“MARY MCCARTNEY

“P.S. I am going to be Marie Courtenay when I get my name up in the pictures. Put that in the Directory and see how it looks.

“P.S.2. How is my soldier boy getting along? Poor kid! I expect he is finding it a lot different from Broadway with money in your pocket.”