your mother called her?' 'Don't let her know,' says our ornamental young
weeper. 'Tell her somebody else is doing it. Tell her it's from that
white-whiskered old--from the elderly and handsome gentleman with the
benevolent expres--'"

"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.