child touches something forbidden. She didn't say a word, just watched me mischievously while she arranged the tea cups on the other end of the table. Presently she lighted a tiny temple lamp, melted a dab of sealing wax in its wavering blue flames--rose-colored wax it was--and it splashed out on the gray blotter like molten fire.

She took the bit of bronze from my fingers and pressed it firmly on the wax.

"It's a mouth--" I murmured. "It's lips--"

"It's her kiss," she answered me. "That's the most beautiful and the most difficult thing I ever made. It's Felicia Day's letter seal."

"Then she really is a real person--" I stammered fatuously.

"Real?" The girl's low voice lifted itself belligerently. "What do you think she is? Imitation? Why, she's the one REAL thing in this whole sham world! I guess you've never met anybody who knew her or you wouldn't keep gulping out idiotic things like that! I guess if you ever talked with her even a minute you'd understand how real she is. She has the crispest--the sincerest way of speaking. Though of course it's not a bit like other people's ways. She probably doesn't talk like anybody you've ever listened to. Not like anybody I've ever heard of anyway." The girl's eyes were glowing. "Are you musical?" she demanded. "Because I need a musical word to tell you how she talks. She talks _rubato_. Her short words drawl ever so long and her long ones hurry so's to let her make up for the stolen time. And she has a sort of trace of accent like--well, it's not like anything except herself really. You see, her mother wasn't French but she was brought up with French people and Felice says 'evaire' and 'nevaire' and uses funny little Frenchy phrases she heard her mother use though she doesn't really talk French at all. And she has a bossy way of speaking, kind of --well, humbly bossing, if you can get me. Talks like a Lady Pied Piper and sweeps you along with her just about six minutes after she's begun coaxing you to do whatever she's decided is the best thing for you to do. Believe me, I know she does it! Because I was one of the first ones she swept along!" The girl's words were tumbling so fast now that I could hardly follow.

"Did you ever find yourself in heaps of trouble? Too much trouble to stand? Did you? I was that way the day she opened my door. It made me perfectly furious to have her open my door. And she looked so little and so old and so frumpy--she'd been sewing all day for my beastly step-aunt and I'd been trying all day to get the courage to--to--" the girl's tears were streaming now and she didn't bother to wipe them away, she seemed utterly unashamed of them, "to get rid of myself. And just the minute I got the cork out of the bottle that little old angel opened the door. She was so darned different from anybody I'd ever seen in all my life and she talked so differently from anybody I'd ever listened to, I--well, I sort of forgot wanting to die because I was curious to find out where on earth she'd come from--or where on earth she was going to! She had a funny little dog under her arm; she gave it to me to hold. And the next thing I knew she was inviting me to go home with her. She thought I might like this room, she said. She told me it was filled 'with-an-abundance-of-weeds-we-have-not-any- names-for--' Wasn't that an absolute corker? That was her way of describing the Italian family with too many brats that were living here. She'd got that apology for 'em out of her great-great-grandma's garden book! Can you beat it? She talks about everybody as if they belonged in a garden. She called me--" the girl's lips quivered,--"a rosebush that had been pruned too much--roots cramped--she said-- anyway she picked me up to transplant me! Marched me into the 'orrible, messy, noisy, smelly hutch that this house used to be, up all those eighty 'leven stairs, and she kept her chin in the air as though it was a royal palace she was taking me into! She just kept saying,

"'Come! You'll love, love, love it! And you're going to be proud, proud, proud to live here--'

"I was proud, all right," the girl's voice choked. "I wouldn't have missed living here those next two months, not for all the marble that was ever quarried nor for all the glory that was Greece! That first night we both slept in this room--" she paused dramatically and threw open the door in the east wall to let me peer into the narrow hall room, "there--see--"

Ah! that bare little room! So tidy! With faded discolored wall paper and a scrubbed pine floor! With its battered iron bed! There's an old table by the one window with a child's silver mug and plate and spoon on it, each of them with a great bee carved upon it. That's all there is in that room save a low chair and a superb but shabby walnut bureau.

"She loved it so much that she wouldn't change it when she was building Octavia House over--"

"Octavia House!" I cried. "Why, that's that queer house where all the young geniuses live! The one that the Peter Alden money built--"

"It's not a queer house!" the girl defied me. "It's--it's this house! And you can't say Money built this house! Money couldn't have done it! Not all the money in the world, couldn't! It wasn't Money! It was-- Pride! Not the sort of pride that goeth before _de_struction but that mightier pride that goeth before _con_struction! No, no!" she murmured vehemently, "it wasn't Money! It was really almost done before the money came! And she didn't just build the house over, she built all of us over. And built the whole world over for us all. Just with her pride in us! Just with the pride she made us feel in ourselves! And do you know, we were all such self-centered idiots, that it wasn't until after she was gone that we grasped what she'd done with us? We didn't know the glory and the wonder of her until after she was gone--"

"She's not--?"

The Sculptor Girl answered my half-asked question almost ferociously.

"Of course she's not dead! She is the alivest person in this whole world--aliver than you or I can ever be! And yet,--we've lost her. She isn't just _ours_ any more. And when she was blessedly, absolutely just ours--we didn't appreciate her. You see, she was so frumpy and absurd and quiet we didn't think about her--we scarcely saw her. But oh--the minute when we did see her! It came in a flash for me! I just knew, all of a sudden, that she was perfectly beautiful--as beautiful as her own whistle--her lovely, lovely Mademoiselle Folly whistle--"

"Oh! Oh!" I gasped, "_You can't mean that she was--is--Mademoiselle Folly?_"

"Mean it? Didn't you know it? Didn't you ever hear her whistle? Oh, even now that she's gone it seems to me that I can still hear her whistling! And no matter what any one has said about it--they couldn't all of them, put together, say half enough--not even if they all said things as gushy as the Poetry Girl--she said it was like water trickling in a moonlit fountain! I only know it's like what I tried to put into my little Pandora--that it was like what Barrie was thinking when he let Peter Pan cry, 'I'm Joy! Joy! Joy!'--Even the Painter Boy, who has a silly pose that he hates music, used to hang around to hear her whistle--he pretended he was just looking at her so's he could paint her, but that didn't fool me--Listen, there's Nor' stumping up stairs now--he's awfully lame on these rainy days and _that_ moody--"

"Do you mean Noralla? The one who did 'The Spirit of Romance'? Does he live here?"

She nodded impishly.

"And Thad, the cartoonist and Blythe Modder and--" she began reeling off a victorious list of young celebrities.

"And that one little dressmaker discovered you all?" I asked, quite awestricken, "How could she? What sort of a wonder was she? How can you explain it?"

The girl swung her lithe self up on the table, clasped her narrow hands about her knees and smiled benignly down upon me. She seemed naively content with herself, relaxed and quiet after her tempestuous storm of words.

"You can't explain it, you just accept it--just as you accept sunshine and rain--you can't explain any more than you can describe. And she's the sort of woman that all of us who dwell within this house will go on all the rest of our lives trying to describe and I'll bet that not all of us put together can tell more'n half that there is to tell about her. Why, her very faults are different than other people's faults! She has a pippin of a temper and such stub-stub-stubborn ways! Don't you think Thad's cartoons of 'Temperamental Therese' are peaches? Well, they are nothing but Felice in her illogical crotchety unfair minutes--Thad says the only way to explain such heavenly rudeness as Felicia's is to remember that she began being rude in 1817--"

"How old is she?" I fairly shouted, "Oh, please get down to earth and tell me something definite about her! You're perfectly maddening!"

The girl jumped lightly to the floor and slipped across the room to swing the casement in the north wall and let me peer down into Felicia's garden. If you'll look on the back of your envelope you can see just how it was, just how the walls shut off the rectory yard.

"She's exactly twenty-seven," she sighed, "the most perfect age to be! And if you were really going to tell her story you wouldn't have to go back all the way to 1817, you'd begin it about--well, let me see-- you'd begin it about 1897, I think, and right down there in that wee little garden. And of course you'd begin it with her whistling. And you'd ask anybody you were trying to tell about her whether they'd ever heard Mademoiselle Folly whistle--"

Did you? For if you have, I'm sure you've never forgotten the droll way that Mademoiselle Folly stepped out upon a stage in her quaint green frock and made her frightened curtsy. Can you recall her low contralto drawl and her inevitable,

"Oh, my dears, I do _so_ hope that you're going to be good at pretending! You all of you look as though you could pretend if you just started! So let's you and I pretend that--"

Oh, I do so hope that you, too, are going "to be good at pretending"! That you can make yourself pretend that it's twenty years ago and that you're a nice invisible somebody standing down in a wee back yard of Felicia's. From the garden you can't see the river because the walls are too high. But now you're so close to them you see that they're crumbly brick walls almost covered with vines and that at prim intervals along their tops there are elaborate wrought-iron urns, each filled with a huge dusty century plant. And in the side wall toward the rectory yard of the church you can see an unused iron gate, its rusty lock and hinges matted through and through with ancient ivy. Pretend that it's moon-light and it's spring and that it's early evening in the year of our Lord 1897 and that over there by the gate is Felicia Day, about seven years old, peering through the gate into