“Certainly,” says Miss Abbott, “I never showed any other special signs of intelligence, being always, I remember, at the extreme foot of my class in every subject except English. Surely nothing but my father’s unfailing sympathy and understanding sustained either me or my teachers, through the dreadful period of fractions and other mathematical horrors. And it was here at this school that I formed the first intellectual friendship of my life with a little, fair-haired, blue-eyed, earnest-minded boy who is now Professor Thomas Whittemore, of Tufts College. While the other children giggled over ink-dipped pigtails, wrote facetious notes about their teachers, and traded postage stamps, we two were whispering about authors and exchanging autographs and timidly confiding literary ambitions to each other. Funny little people we must have been--astonishingly solemn, inordinately dignified and most deliciously important With all the grave, childish self-consciousness of having already fixed our minds on higher things.
“I recall one day when we were swapping a Longfellow check-stub for a Whittier post-card, or something of that sort. We got caught at it and were kept ignominiously after school, to the infinite delight of our more frivolous-minded companions.”
Miss Abbott’s husband, Dr. Fordyce Coburn, is the “silent partner” in her work to whom _Molly Make-Believe_ is dedicated. He aids and abets her in her stories, in taking a course in playwriting at Harvard under Professor George Baker, in anything she wants to do. Dr. Coburn is medical adviser of the Lowell high school and an all-round athlete and sportsman whenever a city practice will release him sufficiently. He and Mrs. Coburn spend their spare time salmon fishing in Maine, playing tennis at Lowell, coon and wild turkey hunting on the edge of the Florida everglades--doing anything, in fact, that two persons, husband and wife, great comrades and possessing similar tastes, can always find to do happily together.
_Molly Make-Believe_, 1910. _The Sick-a-Bed Lady_, 1911. _The White-Linen Nurse_, 1913. _The Indiscreet Letter_, 1915. _Little Eve Edgarton_, 1915. _The Stingy Receiver_, 1917.
_Published by the Century Company, New York_.