Page:Bambi (1914).djvu/162

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142
BAMBI

“Is it dancing?” from Jarvis.

“Of a sort.”

“Not public dancing?”

“No, private,” she giggled.

“Will it take you away much?” Jarvis asked her.

“Oh, I’ll go to New York occasionally.”

“It is to be a secret, I take it?” the Professor said.

“It is, old Sherlock Holmes.”

They slipped back into their routine of life as if it had never been broken. Jarvis, after two perturbed days of restlessness, went into a work fit over a new play. The Professor was busy with final examinations, so Bambi was left alone with plenty of leisure in which to do her next story.

She wisely decided to write herself—in other words, to dramatize her own experiences, to draw on her emotions, her own views of life. She must leave it to Jarvis to rouse and stir people. She would be content to amuse and charm them. So she boldly called her tale by her own name, “Francesca,” and she shamelessly introduced the Professor and Jarvis, with a thin disguise, and chortled over their true likeness after she had dipped them in the solution of her imagination. She relied on the fact that neither of them ever looked between the covers of a