"You must not give your kisses with such ease," he told her upon one
occasion; "the girl in the play has never been kissed."

She shrugged her shoulders and ignored him. Again he remonstrated.
"She's frank and free," he said. "Make her that. Make her that. Men must
fight for her favors."

She came to it at last, helped by that Rosalind-like quality in herself.
She was young, as he had wanted Elise to be, clean-hearted,
joyous--girlhood at its best.

Gradually Jimmie ceased to suggest. He would sit beside us in the
dimness of the empty auditorium, and watch her as if he drank her in.
Now and then he would laugh a little, and say, under his breath: "How
did I ever write it? How did it ever happen?"

Elise, on the other side of him, said, at last, "I knew you could do it,
Jimmie."

"You thought I could do great things. You never knew I could do--this--"

It was toward the end of the month that Duncan said to me one night as
we rode home on the top of a 'bus, "You don't suppose that he--"

"Elise thinks it," I said. "It's waking her up."

Elise and Jimmie had been married fifteen years, and had never had a
honeymoon, not in the sense that Jimmie wanted it--an adventure in
romance, to some spot where they could forget the world of work, the
world of sordid things, the world that was making Jimmie old. Every