person has suffered, for suffering breeds genius. It
expands the soul just as over-prosperity shrivels it. You
see it all the way from Lew Fields to Sarah Bernhardt; from
Mendelssohn to Irving Berlin; from Mischa Elman to Charlie
Chaplin. You were a person set apart in Winnebago. Instead
of thanking your God for that, you set out to be something
you aren't. No, it's worse than that. You're trying not to
be what you are. And it's going to do for you."

"Stop!" cried Fanny. "My head's whirling. It sounds like
something out of `Alice in Wonderland.'"

"And you," retorted Heyl, "sound like some one who's afraid
to talk or think about herself. You're suppressing the
thing that is you. You're cutting yourself off from your
own people--a dramatic, impulsive, emotional people. By
doing those things you're killing the goose that lays the
golden egg. What's that old copy-book line? `To thine own
self be true,' and the rest of it."

"Yes; like Theodore, for example," sneered Fanny.

At which unpleasant point Nature kindly supplied a
diversion. Across the black sky there shot two luminous
shafts of lights. Northern lights, pale sisters of the
chromatic glory one sees in the far north, but still weirdly
beautiful. Fanny and Heyl stopped short, faces upturned.
The ghostly radiance wavered, expanded, glowed palely, like
celestial searchlights. Suddenly, from the tip of each
shaft, there burst a cluster of slender, pin-point lines,