Over Paradise Ridge

I am not going to try to describe that play of Peter's. The newspapers used all the adjectives and things there are in the English language to express enthusiasm with, and I haven't got any left. I will simply tell about it.

When Peter had gone out and buried himself in the shack on the hillside of The Briers, that looked out over the Harpeth Valley, he had unconsciously buried that frozen hero in "The Emergence" and had gone to work and resurrected him in a kind of Samuel Foster Crittenden. Instead of being a complicated, heroic, erratic genius he was just a big, simple, strong young man who was doing his part in the corner of the world's vineyard where he had been sent to work. To help him Peter had written in a wonderful girl with a great deal of brains for one so young. Just the sort of woman that men like Sam and the hero deserve to have. She was so lovely that I caught my breath and--and suffered. But what made everybody in that theater laugh themselves happy was the essence of Hayesboro that Peter had distilled and poured into his characters. Everybody was so mixed up with everybody else that nobody could feel sensitive or fail to enjoy every character. I couldn't tell whether I was the girl that practised tango steps all the time, even when the minister (who had manners like those of Colonel Menefee and the Mayor of Hayesboro) came to supper, or the girl that always had a plate of hickory-nut candy in her hand and kept saying sharp things while giving everybody something sweet to take away the taste. Julia said she was that girl, but Peter indignantly denied anybody's being anybody, and then we all kept still. Just then the curtain went down on the second act, with the whole house in an uproar; and there was a call for Peter and Farrington.

Peter went and left me sitting there in the shadow alone, while he stepped out on the stage all by himself--the stage of his life. And, oh, I was so glad to be in the shadow all by myself, for I had been as happy as I could and it was beginning to wear off. I wanted Sam--I wanted him even if the wonderful woman in the play was going to have him in real life, too, as I knew would have to happen some day. Also Sam deserved to be there that night if anybody did, and he was way down in the Harpeth Valley working, working, working, it seemed to me, that all the rest of the world might play. I wanted him! I felt as if I couldn't stand it when Peter stepped forward, looking like the most beautiful Keats the world had ever known, and the whole house gasped at his beauty and kept still to hear what a man that looked like that would have to say. I stifled a sob and looked around to see if I could flee somewhere, when suddenly my groping hand was taken in two big, warm, horny ones, and Sam's deep voice said in the same old fish-hook tone: "Steady, Bettykin, and watch old Pete take his first hurdle."