Author’s Note: This play is derived from a longer work in progress, The Gentleman Caller. It corresponds to the last act of that play, roughly, but has a lighter treatment and a different ending.

The feeling of the play is nostalgic. It belongs to memory, which is softly lighted and not too realistic, and often has the quality of faint music. The curtain rises on the interior of Apartment F, third floor south, on Maple Street in Saint Louis, in a block that also contains the Ever-ready Garage, a Chinese laundry, and a bookie’s shop disguised as a cigar store. It is early summer. There are billowing white lace curtains at the windows and the furnishings of the little apartment contrive to have a certain grace and charm in spite of their cheapness. The scene is played in two areas, downstage for the living room and upstage for the dining room. Portieres are between the two areas, which give the effect of a second proscenium or a stage within a stage. That faint music, which is the music of memory, is heard as the curtain rises.

AMANDA [offstage]: Don’t come into the kitchen in your white dress! Go in front and relax till they get here.

[A door at the back of the upstage area is opened and Laura comes in. She is a very slight and delicate girl of nineteen. She has a fugitive prettiness that could easily escape attention, that comes and goes, but sometimes could stab your heart. Probably the dress that she actually wore on this evening was not so lovely as that which memory gives her. She seems to move in a radiance of her own. Amanda enters the dining room with a bowl of jonquils, which she places between the candelabra on the drop leaf table. She is a middle-aged woman of great energy whose early prettiness was more emphatic than Laura’s. She has relinquished none of the girlish vivacity that must have been so charming in her youth but now is a little comical or pathetic.]

AMANDA: I was carrying jonquils the very first afternoon that I met your father. However it wouldn’t be fair to blame that on the flowers. The Cutrere boy had driven me over to Clarksdale to see old Agnes Hoskins who’d just had another stroke and couldn’t talk. It depressed me so to see her in that condition, but on the way back we passed this field of jonquils, literally thousands of them. I made Dave stop the car, and I got out and gathered my two arms full. Dave was annoyed because I wouldn’t put them down in the back seat of the car. I used them for a shield when he tried to kiss me. I didn’t care to be kissed by Dave Cutrere! [She laughs archly.] But when I got home and entered the downstairs hall, still carrying all those jonquils in my arms—Well, there was your father, discovered for the first time, installing a telephone at the foot of the stairs. How much better it would have been if—! [She crosses downstage to Laura.] Still—I wouldn’t have had a daughter as pretty as you! If I hadn’t married that telephone man, who fell in love with long-distance. That hem’s a little uneven—hardly noticeable though, I’ll leave it alone. I’ve got to mix the dressing for the salmon and change myself and it’s already five of six. Laura, you’re almost as pretty as I used to be. It’s early for white, but white’s so lovely on you. You’re so slender, Laura. It’s better to start out slender, for life does put flesh on you. I’m very lucky that I can still wear misses. Turn around. Yes—it dips a little but men don’t notice such things. You’ve never looked so pretty and maybe you’ll never look so pretty again. So be on your best behavior; for once come out of the shell— Vivacity counts for so much!