Over Paradise Ridge

I didn't blame Peter at all, for that play was his "little one" and his first. I just took it out in hating and vilifying Farrington, until I got Peter much comforted, even interested in hearing about the splendid price Sam had got for the north-field rye. Then it was time for us to go to bed, and I suppose it was best that it was too late for Mabel to come into my room to tell me her version of Peter's troubles. For that one night I sympathized fully with him. The next morning I was shown another side of the question. And I felt decidedly different about Mr. Farrington when he talked to me for a little while, alone before dinner the next day, and after Judge Vandyne had also had me in solitary conversation.

"You see, my dear young lady," said Mr. Farrington, with that twin-star smile in his eyes I have mentioned, "the very wonderful nature that grows and flowers such an exquisite young first play as this of our young friend's, is the undoing of the work and the producer, unless he is a heartless old brute like the one to whom you are at present talking."

"Oh, I don't think you are that now, not at all. I--I think you are wonderful, and I trust you with the play even though you haven't told me anything about what you are doing to it," I exclaimed in great confidence and enthusiasm.

"You are a wonderful bit lass yourself, and I trust you with my poet, even if you haven't told me just what you are going to do with him," he answered, and looked at me with the real affection, tempered with amusement, that daddy and Judge Vandyne and Dr. Chubb all use toward me.

I blushed and was just going to tell him that--well, I don't know just what I was going to tell him, but I am sure I'd have opened my innermost heart to him, for that is what he invites, when in came Peter and the rest, and we all went in to dinner. I didn't see the great dean of the American stage alone any more, but he whispered to me just as Mabel and Miss Greenough and I were leaving the room: "Keep my poet easy, and you'll see what you see."

I am glad now when I look back on it that my presence did help Peter through the ordeal of that two weeks. Also Mabel and I had schemes together to take his mind off his dying child, which was being operated on by Farrington to make it a success. The best diversion, however, was Judge Vandyne's. He asked me to make out a list of ten of Peter's Hayesboro friends, for whom he would send a private car over one of his railroads, to bring them up for the first night of the play. That was to be the 20th of September, and even then the bills were up all over New York. I could see, from the way Judge Vandyne was taking it all, that he intended to make the best of having a poet for a son, and to put it through with his usual energetic force.