summer Jimmie had asked for it, and always Elise had said, "Wait."

But now it was Elise who began to plan. "When your play is produced,
we'll run away somewhere. Do you remember the place you always talked
about--up in the hills?"

He looked at her through his round glasses. "I can't get away from
this"--he waved his hand toward the stage.

"If it's a success you can, Jimmie."

"It will be a success. Ursula Simms is a wonder. Look at her, Elise.
Look at her!"

Duncan and I could look at nothing else. As many times as I had seen her
in the part, I came to it always eagerly. It was her great scene--where
the girl, breaking free from all that has bound her, takes the hand of
her vagabond lover and goes forth, leaving behind wealth and a marriage
of distinction, that she may wander across the moors and down on the
sands, with the wild wind in her face, the stars for a canopy!

It tugged at our hearts. It would tug, we knew, at the heart of any
audience. It was the human nature in us all which responded. Not one of
us but would have broken bonds. Oh, youth, youth! Is there anything like
it in the whole wide world?

I do not think that it tugged at the heart of Elise. Her heart was not
like that. It was a stay-at-home heart. A workaday-world heart. Elise
would never under any circumstance have gone forth with a vagabond on a
wild night.