Free Reprise by Joan Smith

ain’t that bad, Nevvie. I like them excessively. I hadn’t heard they had run so short of cash in Rome they were auctioning their pieces off.”
    “Shall we go on out before we have the whole throng in here?” Dammler asked as he heard Hettie’s group approach.
    “They are at my heels, are they?” Clarence asked, not at all annoyed with the persistence of his fans. “We had better run along then. I see the crowd is thinning. I’ll take you home, Prudence. It is after three, and you will be getting sleepy.” It was himself who was having trouble keeping his eyes open. He was sorry to have to pull himself away, but with the euphoria of having patched up things between the lovers, he did it.
    Dammler accompanied them to the front door, thanking them for coming, and assuring them he would go to them the next day. Prudence clutched his book, resigned to leave only because she was so anxious to begin reading it. Tomorrow when he came she would tell him about her own awful book, and make him understand.
     

Chapter Six
     
    Dammler’s party was not overbefore four. He went into his study for a last look around to see what it was that had annoyed Prudence when first she entered. It wasn’t the lady’s desk, after all. She still loved him, so it should have pleased her, but it hadn’t. Really it seemed to be his own desk that bothered her. Did she want a private study; was that it? His mind ran over possible rooms that could be turned into one, though he particularly wanted to share this room with her. He went to give a last good night to Alexander Pope’s desk, with a lingering smile at Uncle’s nonsense. The man was better than a joke book.
    Absentmindedly he picked up the book, Babe in the Woods, and carried it with him upstairs. He always read half an hour before sleeping. As he felt his reading would be little attended this night, he didn’t much care what he read. Glancing at the title, he made himself a bet the title was wrongly interpreted. The female author would take it to mean a child lost in the woods, or some more civilized symbol, probably a girl out of her element in society, whereas the true origin of the phrase referred to a person set in the stocks. He read two pages, enough to realize he had won his bet with himself, but as he rather enjoyed the author’s style, he read on a little further. A phrase here and there reminded him of Prudence, enough to keep him going. By the end of the first chapter, he had concluded someone was copying her style, using her trick of saying one thing and letting it be known by the circumstances quite another was meant. But not so well done as Prudence, he decided loyally.
    The end of Chapter Two made him think that not only her style but a little something of her own story was creeping in, too. Someone, some jealous cat--really there was a viperish touch here that was not at all like Prue--was writing a parody of the two of them, or so it seemed to him. He read on with the keenest interest now, confirming that it was about them. He was finished with Volume One in an hour, as he was a quick reader, and when he laid it down, there was a question on his face. It wasn’t possible Prudence had written this thing. But how very odd that so many of his own ideas were running around in the book, distorted, placed in a new context to make them worse, but still his own ideas--original ones. He hadn’t read far into the second volume without realizing that the perpetrator was none other than Prudence Mallow. Certain passages left not a single doubt. Ideas he had shared with no one but herself, and here they were, coming back at him, word for word. Hettie too--certainly “Lady Maldire” was Hettie, with an assortment of rings replacing her customary excess of brooches.
    He was so angry the blood thumped in his temples, and so intrigued he had no thought of putting the book down without finishing it that night, which was already nearly morning. The sun was rising when he laid