The wistfulness was gone. She adjusted her glasses on her nose and eyed him sharply.
"I think too much about old age," she said. "I regard mine as a kind of mildew, and every day and forty times a day I peer at myself to see if the mildew's growing thicker. But you don't seem to have any mildew, Billy. You're just a different kind of person from what you were fifty years ago. You haven't gone bad at all."
Billy set his correct feet together on the floor, rose, and, with his hand on his heart, made her a bow.
"I don't care for it much myself," he said.
"Growing old? It's the devil, Billy. Don't talk about it. Why aren't you in England?"
"I'm junior partner now."
"I know it."
"I'm a great publisher, Florrie."
She nodded.
"Your men run over to arrange with us in London. There was no occasion for my coming here. But I simply wanted to. I got a little curious—homesick, maybe. So I came. Got in last night. I read your book before I sailed."
She looked at him quizzically and almost, it might be said, with a droll uneasiness.
"You brought it out in England," she offered, in rather a small voice. "Naturally you'd read it."
"Not because we brought it out. Because it was yours," he corrected her. "My word, Florrie, what a life you've had of it."
The pink crept into her cheeks. Her eyes menaced him.
"Are you trying to pump me, Billy Stark?" she inquired.
"Not for a moment. But you're guilty, Florrie. What is it?"
She considered, her gaze bent on her lap.
"Well, the fact is, Billy," she temporized, "I've got in pretty deep with that book. I wrote it as a sort of a—well, I wrote it, you know, and I thought I might get a few hundred dollars out of it, same as I have out of those novels I used to write to keep lace on my petticoats. Well! the public has made a fool of itself over the book. Every day I get piles of letters asking what I meant by this and that, and won't I give my documentary evidence for saying this or that great gun did so and so at such a time."
"Well, why don't you?"
"Give my evidence? Why, I can't!" She was half whimpering, with a laugh on her old face. "I haven't got it."
"You mean you haven't the actual letters now. Those extraordinary ones of the abolitionist group, for example,—can't you produce them?"
"Why no, Billy, of course I can't. I"—she held his glance with a mixture of deprecation and a gay delight—"I made them up."
William Stark, the publisher, looked at her with round blue eyes growing rounder and a deeper red surging into his sea-tanned face. He seemed on the point of bursting into an explosion, whether of horror or mirth Madam Fulton could not tell. She continued to gaze at him in the same mingling of deprecating and amused inquiry. In spite of her years she looked like a little animal which, having done wrong, seeks out means of propitiation, and as yet knows nothing better than the lifted eyebrow of inquiry.
"Well," she said again defiantly, "I made them up."
"In God's name, Florrie, what for?"
"I wanted to."
"To pad out your book?"
"To make a nice book, the kind of one I wanted. I'll tell you what, Billy,"—she bowled caution into the farthest distance,—"I'm going to make a clean breast of it. Now you won't peach?"
He shook his head.
"Go on," he bade her.
She lifted her head, sat straighter in her chair, and spoke with firmness:—
"Now, Billy, if I'm going to talk to you at all, you must know precisely where I stand. Maybe you do, but I don't believe it. You see, all these years I've been writing what I called novels, and they've paid me a little, and I've got up a sort of local fame. I'm as poor—well, I can't tell you how poor. Only I live here in the summer with Electra in her house—"
"It's the old Fulton house."
"Yes, but it came to her through her father. Remember, I was a second wife. I had no children. My husband gave me the Cambridge place and left this to his son."
"What became of the Cambridge house?"
"Sold, years ago. Eaten up. Seems as if I'd done nothing, all these years, but eat. It makes me sick to think of it. Well, here was I, credit low, my little knack at writing all but gone—why, Billy, styles have changed since my day. Folks would hoot at my novels now. They don't read them. They just remember I wrote them when they want a celebrity at a tea. I'm a back number. Don't you know it?"
He nodded, gravely pondering. The one thing about him never to be affected by his whimsical humor was the integrity of a business verdict. Madam Fulton now was warming to the value of her own position. She began to see how picturesque it was.
"Well, then up rises one of your precious publishers and says to me, 'Mrs. Fulton, you have known all the celebrated people. Why not write your recollections?' 'Why not?' says I. Well, I went home and sat down and wrote. And when I looked back at my life, I found it dull. So I gave myself a free hand. I described the miserable thing as it ought to have been, not as it was."
William Stark was leaning forward, looking her in the face, his hands on his knees, as if to steady him through an amazing crisis.
"Florrie," he began, "do you mean to say you made up most of the letters in that book?"
"Most of them? Every one! I hadn't any letters from celebrities. Days when I might have had, I didn't care a button about the eggs they were cackling over, and I didn't know they were going to be celebrities, then, did I?"
"Do you mean the recollections of Brook Farm, taken down from the lips of the old poet as he had it from a member of the fraternity there—"
"Faked, dear boy, faked, every one of them." She was gathering cheerfulness by the way.
"The story of Hawthorne and the first edition—"
"Hypothetical. Grouse in the gun-room."
"Do you mean that the story of the old slave who came to your mother's door in Waltham, and the three abolitionists on their way to the meeting—"
"Now what's the use, Billy Stark?" cried the old lady. "I told you it was a fake from beginning to end. So it is. So is every page of it. If I'd written my recollections as they were, the book would have been a pamphlet of twenty odd pages. It would have said I married a learned professor because I thought if I got into Cambridge society I should see life, and life was what I wanted. It would have gone on to say I found it death and nothing else, and when my husband died I spent all the money I could get trying to see life and I never saw it then. Who'd have printed that? Pretty recollections, I should say!"
Mr. Stark was still musing, his eyes interrogating her.
"It's really incredible, Florrie," he said at last. "Poor dear! you needed the money."
"That wasn't it."
"Then what was?"
"I don't know." But immediately her face folded up into its smiling creases and she said, "I wanted some fun."
William Stark fell back in his chair and began to laugh, round upon wheezy round. When his glasses had fallen off and his cheeks were wet and his face flamed painfully, Madam Fulton spoke, without a gleam.
"You're a nice man, Billy Stark."
"You wanted your little joke!" he repeated, subsiding and trumpeting into his handkerchief. "Well, you've had it, Florrie; you've had it."
"I don't know that I have," she returned. "I had to enjoy it alone, and that kind of palled on