Part 59

"If you would learn concentration you would not need quiet in which to think," protested her parent.

"Oh, if I would learn to be a camel I wouldn't need a hump," returned Bambi, shortly.

"I don't think a hump would be becoming to you," mused the Professor, turning back to his book.

"We'll send it to Parke, Jarvis."

"What's the use?"

"Don't be silly. Every manager in New York shall see that play before we stop. We will send it to his wife. Maybe she will read it."

"Do as you like about it," he answered, with superb impersonality.

She took his advice and got it off at once, addressed to the actress. In a week came a letter in reply saying that Miss Harper would like to talk to Mr. Jocelyn about the play, and making an appointment at her house two days later.

This letter threw them into great excitement. Jarvis protested, first, that he could not be interrupted at his present work, which interested him. Bambi pooh-poohed that excuse. Then he said he had never talked to an actress, and he had heard they were a fussy lot. She would probably want him to change the play; as he would not do that, there was no use seeing the woman. Bambi informed him that if Miss Harper would get the play produced, it would pay Jarvis to do exactly what she wanted done. Then he protested he hated New York. He didn't want to go back there. Bambi finally lost her temper.

"If you are going to act like a balky horse, I give you up. Until you get started, you will have to do a great many things you will not like, but if I were a man, I would never let any obstacles down me."

"When can I get a train?" meekly.

"You can take the same train we took before, to-morrow morning."

A great light broke for Jarvis.

"I can't go. I haven't any money."

"I have. I'll lend it to you."

"I must owe you thousands now."

"Not quite. We can do this all right."

"Have you got it all down?"

"In the Black Maria," she nodded.

So the long and the short of it was that Jarvis went off to New York again. No martyr ever approached the stake with a more saddened visage than he turned upon Bambi as the train pulled out. She waved her hand at him, smiling pleasantly, but he was sorrowful to the last glimpse.

"Poor old baby!" she laughed. "He shall stay in New York a while. He is getting too dependent on mamma."

She really welcomed his absence. It gave her so much more time for her own work, which absorbed and delighted her. She had never known any sensation so pleasurable as that sense of adventure with which, each morning, she went to work. First, she patted the manuscript pile, which grew so amazingly fast. Then she filled her fountain pen and looked off over the treetops, beyond her window, until, like Peter Pan, she slipped off into another world, the Land of Make Believe, a country she had discovered for herself and peopled with human beings to suit her own taste. To be sure, heir story concerned itself mainly with herself, Jarvis, and the Professor, but only the traits that made them individual, that made them "they," were selected, and the experiences she took them through were entirely of her own making. It was such fun to make them real by the power of words; to make many people know them and love them, or condemn them, as the case might be. In fact, creation was absorbing.

"It's very quiet around here since Jarvis left," commented the Professor a few days later.

"I never thought Jarvis was noisy."

"Well, he's like distant thunder."

"And heat lightning," laughed Bambi.

"Do you happen to miss him?"

"Me? Oh, not at all. Do you?"