fashioned mosaic brooch of her mother's which reposed on her polka-dotted dress just above her stomach.
"Where did you get Mother's brooch?" asked Alice.
"Your bwooch?" questioned Sara blandly, clapping her hand over it.
"My brooch on your dress, Sara."
"On my dress?" asked Sara blankly, carefully surveying her extended hand, its five fingers wide apart. Tom tried another mode of attack.
"Take your hand off Mother's brooch," he said sharply.
"My hand?" asked Sara with grief. It was evident that she understood nothing of all this talk.
"Lift your hand up in the air, Sara," commanded her father. She lifted it up. Had the brooch just then flown down upon her like a bird and alighted in the middle of her person she could not have been a more surprised and bewildered little girl.
"Why, so 'tis!" she cried, deeply shocked.
It is an awful thing when an honest man realizes that his daughter is a natural-born liar; not only that, but a liar who lies with joy in the dramatic effect.
It was going to be a harder task than Tom imagined. If it were the fashion to write problem novels about things like this one could write one about the Truth and Tom and Sara.
"How do you make them tell it?" is the problem.
The material for the great scene in the third act is the clash of their two different life ideals. The scene of Tom sitting in a train taking Sara to New York to visit could be made heart-rending.
Sara sat behind her father with a kind fat lady, Tom with a man reading a paper. It could be a piece of fine acting to portray Tom's anguish at hearing Sara remark pleasantly to the fat lady:
