Part 3 (1/2)

”The pictures are not altogether satisfactory. It isn't a 'type' that I am looking for, but a definite likeness of 'Molly' herself. Kindly rectify the mistake without further delay! or REFUND THE MONEY.”

Almost all the rest of the night he amused himself chuckling to think how the terrible threat about refunding the money would confuse and conquer the extravagant little Art Student.

But it was his own hands that did the nervous trembling when he opened the big express package that arrived the next evening, just as his tiresome porridge supper was finished.

”Ah, Sweetheart--” said the dainty note tucked inside the package--”Ah, Sweetheart, the little G.o.d of love be praised for one true lover--Yourself! So it is a picture of _me_ that you want? The _real me_! The _truly me_! No mere pink and white likeness? No actual proof even of 'seared and yellow age'? No curly-haired, coquettish attractiveness that the shampoo-lady and the photograph-man trapped me into for that one single second? No deceptive profile of the best side of my face--and I, perhaps, blind in the other eye? Not even a fair, honest, every-day portrait of my father's and mother's composite features--but a picture of _myself_!

Hooray for you! A picture, then, not of my physiognomy, but of my _personality_. Very well, sir. Here is the portrait--true to the life--in this great, clumsy, conglomerate package of articles that represent--perhaps--not even so much the prosy, literal things that I am, as the much more illuminating and significant things that _I would like to be_. It's what we would 'like to be' that really tells most about us, isn't it, Carl Stanton? The brown that I have to wear talks loudly enough, for instance, about the color of my complexion, but the forbidden pink that I most crave whispers infinitely more intimately concerning the color of my spirit. And as to my Face--_am I really obliged to have a face_? Oh, no--o!

'Songs without words' are surely the only songs in the world that are packed to the last lilting note with utterly limitless meanings. So in these 'letters without faces' I cast myself quite serenely upon the mercy of your imagination.

”What's that you say? That I've simply _got_ to have a face?

Oh, darn!--well, do your worst. Conjure up for me then, here and now, any sort of features whatsoever that please your fancy. Only, Man of Mine, just remember this in your imaginings: Gift me with Beauty if you like, or gift me with Brains, but do not make the crude masculine mistake of gifting me with both. Thought furrows faces you know, and after Adolescence only Inanity retains its heavenly smoothness. Beauty even at its worst is a gorgeously perfect, flower-sprinkled lawn over which the most ordinary, every-day errands of life cannot cross without scarring. And brains at their best are only a ploughed field teeming always and forever with the worries of incalculable harvests. Make me a little pretty, if you like, and a little wise, but not too much of either, if you value the verities of your Vision. There! I say: do your worst! Make me that face, and that face only, that you _need the most_ in all this big, lonesome world: food for your heart, or fragrance for your nostrils. Only, one face or another--I insist upon having _red hair_!

”MOLLY.”

With his lower lip twisted oddly under the bite of his strong white teeth, Stanton began to unwrap the various packages that comprised the large bundle. If it was a ”portrait” it certainly represented a puzzle-picture.

First there was a small, flat-footed scarlet slipper with a fluffy gold toe to it. Definitely feminine. Definitely small. So much for that! Then there was a sling-shot, ferociously stubby, and rather confusingly boyish. After that, round and flat and tantalizing as an empty plate, the phonograph disc of a totally unfamiliar song--”The Sea Gull's Cry”: a clue surely to neither age nor s.e.x, but indicative possibly of musical preference or mere individual temperament. After that, a tiny geographical globe, with Kipling's phrase--

”For to admire an' for to see, For to be'old this world so wide-- It never done no good to me, But I can't drop it if I tried!”--

written slantingly in very black ink across both hemispheres. Then an empty purse--with a hole in it; a silver-embroidered gauntlet such as hors.e.m.e.n wear on the Mexican frontier; a white table-doily partly embroidered with silky blue forget-me-nots--the threaded needle still jabbed in the work--and the small thimble, Stanton could have sworn, still warm from the snuggle of somebody's finger. Last of all, a fat and formidable edition of Robert Browning's poems; a tiny black domino-mask, such as masqueraders wear, and a s.h.i.+mmering gilt picture frame inclosing a pert yet not irreverent handmade adaptation of a certain portion of St. Paul's epistle to the Corinthians:

”Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not a Sense of Humor, I am become as sounding bra.s.s, or a tinkling symbol. And though I have the gift of Prophecy--and all knowledge--so that I could remove Mountains, and have not a Sense of Humor, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my Goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not a Sense of Humor it profiteth me nothing.

”A sense of Humor suffereth long, and is kind. A Sense of Humor envieth not. A Sense of Humor vaunteth not itself--is not puffed up. Doth not behave itself Unseemly, seeketh not its own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil--Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. A Sense of Humor never faileth. But whether there be unpleasant prophecies they shall fail, whether there be scolding tongues they shall cease, whether there be unfortunate knowledge it shall vanish away. When I was a fault-finding child I spake as a fault-finding child, I understood as a fault-finding child,--but when I became a woman I put away fault-finding things.

”And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three. _But the greatest of these is a sense of humor!_”

With a little chuckle of amus.e.m.e.nt not altogether devoid of a very definite consciousness of being _teased_, Stanton spread all the articles out on the bed-spread before him and tried to piece them together like the fragments of any other jig-saw puzzle. Was the young lady as intellectual as the Robert Browning poems suggested, or did she mean simply to imply that she _wished_ she were? And did the tom-boyish sling-shot fit by any possible chance with the dainty, feminine sc.r.a.p of domestic embroidery? And was the empty purse supposed to be especially significant of an inordinate fondness for phonograph music--or what?

Pondering, puzzling, fretting, fussing, he dozed off to sleep at last before he even knew that it was almost morning. And when he finally woke again he found the Doctor laughing at him because he lay holding a scarlet slipper in his hand.

IV

The next night, very, very late, in a furious riot of wind and snow and sleet, a clerk from the drug-store just around the corner appeared with a perfectly huge hot-water bottle fairly sizzling and bubbling with warmth and relief for aching rheumatic backs.

”Well, where in thunder--?” groaned Stanton out of his cold and pain and misery.

”Search me!” said the drug clerk. ”The order and the money for it came in the last mail this evening. 'Kindly deliver largest-sized hot-water bottle, boiling hot, to Mr. Carl Stanton,... 11.30 to-night.'”

”OO-w!” gasped Stanton. ”O-u-c-h! G-e-e!” then, ”Oh, I wish I could purr!” as he settled cautiously back at last to toast his pains against the blessed, scorching heat. ”Most girls,” he reasoned with surprising interest, ”would have sent ice cold violets shrouded in tissue paper. Now, how does this special girl know--Oh, Ouch! O-u-c-h!

O-u-c-h--i--t--y!” he crooned himself to sleep.

The next night just at supper-time a much-freckled messenger-boy appeared dragging an exceedingly obstreperous fox-terrier on the end of a dangerously frayed leash. Planting himself firmly on the rug in the middle of the room, with the faintest gleam of saucy pink tongue showing between his teeth, the little beast sat and defied the entire situation. Nothing apparently but the correspondence concerning the situation was actually transferable from the freckled messenger boy to Stanton himself.

”Oh, dear Lad,” said the tiny note, ”I forgot to tell you my real name, didn't I!--Well, my last name and the dog's first name are just the same. Funny, isn't it? (You'll find it in the back of almost any dictionary.)

”With love,

”MOLLY.