THE ADVENTURES OF SALLY

By P. G. Wodehouse

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I.   SALLY GIVES A
PARTY

CHAPTER II.   ENTER
GINGER

CHAPTER III.   THE
DIGNIFIED MR. CARMYLE

CHAPTER IV.
  GINGER IN DANGEROUS MOOD

CHAPTER V.   SALLY HEARS NEWS


CHAPTER VI.   FIRST AID FOR
FILLMORE

CHAPTER VII.   SOME
MEDITATIONS ON SUCCESS

CHAPTER VIII.
  REAPPEARANCE OF MR. CARMYLE—AND GINGER


CHAPTER IX.   GINGER BECOMES A
RIGHT-HAND MAN

CHAPTER X.   SALLY
IN THE SHADOWS

CHAPTER XI.   SALLY
RUNS AWAY

CHAPTER XII.   SOME
LETTERS FOR GINGER

CHAPTER XIII.
  STRANGE BEHAVIOUR OF A SPARRING-PARTNER

CHAPTER XIV.   MR. ABRAHAMS
RE-ENGAGES AN OLD EMPLOYEE

CHAPTER
XV.   UNCLE DONALD SPEAKS HIS MIND

CHAPTER XVI.   AT THE FLOWER GARDEN


CHAPTER XVII.   SALLY
LAYS A GHOST

CHAPTER XVIII.      JOURNEY'S
END

CHAPTER I. SALLY GIVES A PARTY

1

Sally looked contentedly down the long table. She felt happy at last.
Everybody was talking and laughing now, and her party, rallying after an
uncertain start, was plainly the success she had hoped it would be. The
first atmosphere of uncomfortable restraint, caused, she was only too well
aware, by her brother Fillmore's white evening waistcoat, had worn off;
and the male and female patrons of Mrs. Meecher's select boarding-house
(transient and residential) were themselves again.

At her end of the table the conversation had turned once more to the great
vital topic of Sally's legacy and what she ought to do with it. The next
best thing to having money of one's own, is to dictate the spending of
somebody else's, and Sally's guests were finding a good deal of
satisfaction in arranging a Budget for her. Rumour having put the sum at
their disposal at a high figure, their suggestions had certain
spaciousness.

“Let me tell you,” said Augustus Bartlett, briskly, “what I'd do, if I
were you.” Augustus Bartlett, who occupied an intensely subordinate
position in the firm of Kahn, Morris and Brown, the Wall Street brokers,
always affected a brisk, incisive style of speech, as befitted a man in
close touch with the great ones of Finance. “I'd sink a couple of hundred
thousand in some good, safe bond-issue—we've just put one out which
you would do well to consider—and play about with the rest. When I
say play about, I mean have a flutter in anything good that crops up.
Multiple Steel's worth looking at. They tell me it'll be up to a hundred
and fifty before next Saturday.”

Elsa Doland, the pretty girl with the big eyes who sat on Mr. Bartlett's
left, had other views.

“Buy a theatre, Sally, and put on good stuff.”

“And lose every bean you've got,” said a mild young man, with a deep voice
across the table. “If I had a few hundred thousand,” said the mild young
man, “I'd put every cent of it on Benny Whistler for the heavyweight
championship. I've private information that Battling Tuke has been got at
and means to lie down in the seventh...”

“Say, listen,” interrupted another voice, “lemme tell you what I'd do with
four hundred thousand...”

“If I had four hundred thousand,” said Elsa Doland, “I know what would be
the first thing I'd do.”

“What's that?” asked Sally.

“Pay my bill for last week, due this morning.”

Sally got up quickly, and flitting down the table, put her arm round her
friend's shoulder and whispered in her ear:

“Elsa darling, are you really broke? If you are, you know, I'll...”

Elsa Doland laughed.

“You're an angel, Sally. There's no one like you. You'd give your last
cent to anyone. Of course I'm not broke. I've just come back from the
road, and I've saved a fortune. I only said that to draw you.”

Sally returned to her seat, relieved, and found that the company had now
divided itself into two schools of thought. The conservative and prudent
element, led by Augustus Bartlett, had definitely decided on three hundred
thousand in Liberty Bonds and the rest in some safe real estate; while the
smaller, more sporting section, impressed by the mild young man's inside
information, had already placed Sally's money on Benny Whistler, doling it
out cautiously in small sums so as not to spoil the market. And so solid,
it seemed, was Mr. Tuke's reputation with those in the inner circle of
knowledge that the mild young man was confident that, if you went about
the matter cannily and without precipitation, three to one might be
obtained. It seemed to Sally that the time had come to correct certain
misapprehensions.

“I don't know where you get your figures,” she said, “but I'm afraid
they're wrong. I've just twenty-five thousand dollars.”

The statement had a chilling effect. To these jugglers with half-millions
the amount mentioned seemed for the moment almost too small to bother
about. It was the sort of sum which they had been mentally setting aside
for the heiress's car fare. Then they managed to adjust their minds to it.
After all, one could do something even with a pittance like twenty-five
thousand.

“If I'd twenty-five thousand,” said Augustus Bartlett, the first to rally
from the shock, “I'd buy Amalgamated...”

“If I had twenty-five thousand...” began Elsa Doland.

“If I'd had twenty-five thousand in the year nineteen hundred,” observed a
gloomy-looking man with spectacles, “I could have started a revolution in
Paraguay.”

He brooded sombrely on what might have been.

“Well, I'll tell you exactly what I'm going to do,” said Sally. “I'm going
to start with a trip to Europe... France, specially. I've heard France
well spoken of—as soon as I can get my passport; and after I've
loafed there for a few weeks, I'm coming back to look about and find some
nice cosy little business which will let me put money into it and keep me
in luxury. Are there any complaints?”

“Even a couple of thousand on Benny Whistler...” said the mild young man.

“I don't want your Benny Whistler,” said Sally. “I wouldn't have him if
you gave him to me. If I want to lose money, I'll go to Monte Carlo and do
it properly.”

“Monte Carlo,” said the gloomy man, brightening up at the magic name. “I
was in Monte Carlo in the year '97, and if I'd had another fifty
dollars... just fifty... I'd have...”

At the far end of the table there was a stir, a cough, and the grating of
a chair on the floor; and slowly, with that easy grace which actors of the
old school learned in the days when acting was acting, Mr. Maxwell
Faucitt, the boarding-house's oldest inhabitant, rose to his feet.

“Ladies,” said Mr. Faucitt, bowing courteously, “and...” ceasing to bow
and casting from beneath his white and venerable eyebrows a quelling
glance at certain male members of the boarding-house's younger set who
were showing a disposition towards restiveness, “... gentlemen. I feel
that I cannot allow this occasion to pass without saying a few words.”

His audience did not seem surprised. It was possible that life, always
prolific of incident in a great city like New York, might some day produce
an occasion which Mr. Faucitt would feel that he could allow to pass
without saying a few words; but nothing of the sort had happened as yet,
and they had given up hope. Right from the start of the meal they had felt
that it would be optimism run mad to expect the old gentleman to abstain
from speech on the night of Sally Nicholas' farewell dinner party; and
partly because they had braced themselves to it, but principally because
Miss Nicholas' hospitality had left them with a genial feeling of
repletion, they settled themselves to listen with something resembling
equanimity. A movement on the part of the Marvellous Murphys—new
arrivals, who had been playing the Bushwick with their equilibristic act
during the preceding week—to form a party of the extreme left and
heckle the speaker, broke down under a cold look from their hostess. Brief
though their acquaintance had been, both of these lissom young gentlemen
admired Sally immensely.

And it should be set on record that this admiration of theirs was not
misplaced. He would have been hard to please who had not been attracted by
Sally. She was a small, trim, wisp of a girl with the tiniest hands and
feet, the friendliest of smiles, and a dimple that came and went in the
curve of her rounded chin. Her eyes, which disappeared when she laughed,
which was often, were a bright hazel; her hair a soft mass of brown. She
had, moreover, a manner, an air of distinction lacking in the majority of
Mrs. Meecher's guests. And she carried youth like a banner. In approving
of Sally, the Marvellous Murphys had been guilty of no lapse from their
high critical standard.

“I have been asked,” proceeded Mr. Faucitt, “though I am aware that there
are others here far worthier of such a task—Brutuses compared with
whom I, like Marc Antony, am no orator—I have been asked to propose
the health...”

“Who asked you?” It was the smaller of the Marvellous Murphys who spoke.
He was an unpleasant youth, snub-nosed and spotty. Still, he could balance
himself with one hand on an inverted ginger-ale bottle while revolving a
barrel on the soles of his feet. There is good in all of us.

“I have been asked,” repeated Mr. Faucitt, ignoring the unmannerly
interruption, which, indeed, he would have found it hard to answer, “to
propose the health of our charming hostess (applause), coupled with the
name of her brother, our old friend Fillmore Nicholas.”

The gentleman referred to, who sat at the speaker's end of the table,
acknowledged the tribute with a brief nod of the head. It was a nod of
condescension; the nod of one who, conscious of being hedged about by
social inferiors, nevertheless does his best to be not unkindly. And
Sally, seeing it, debated in her mind for an instant the advisability of
throwing an orange at her brother. There was one lying ready to her hand,
and his glistening shirt-front offered an admirable mark; but she
restrained herself. After all, if a hostess yields to her primitive
impulses, what happens? Chaos. She had just frowned down the exuberance of
the rebellious Murphys, and she felt that if, even with the highest
motives, she began throwing fruit, her influence for good in that quarter
would be weakened.

She leaned back with a sigh. The temptation had been hard to resist. A
democratic girl, pomposity was a quality which she thoroughly disliked;
and though she loved him, she could not disguise from herself that, ever
since affluence had descended upon him some months ago, her brother
Fillmore had become insufferably pompous. If there are any young men whom
inherited wealth improves, Fillmore Nicholas was not one of them. He
seemed to regard himself nowadays as a sort of Man of Destiny. To converse
with him was for the ordinary human being like being received in audience
by some more than stand-offish monarch. It had taken Sally over an hour to
persuade him to leave his apartment on Riverside Drive and revisit the
boarding-house for this special occasion; and, when he had come, he had
entered wearing such faultless evening dress that he had made the rest of
the party look like a gathering of tramp-cyclists. His white waistcoat
alone was a silent reproach to honest poverty, and had caused an awkward
constraint right through the soup and fish courses. Most of those present
had known Fillmore Nicholas as an impecunious young man who could make a
tweed suit last longer than one would have believed possible; they had
called him “Fill” and helped him in more than usually lean times with
small loans: but to-night they had eyed the waistcoat dumbly and shrank
back abashed.

“Speaking,” said Mr. Faucitt, “as an Englishman—for though I have
long since taken out what are technically known as my 'papers' it was as a
subject of the island kingdom that I first visited this great country—I
may say that the two factors in American life which have always made the
profoundest impression upon me have been the lavishness of American
hospitality and the charm of the American girl. To-night we have been
privileged to witness the American girl in the capacity of hostess, and I
think I am right in saying, in asseverating, in committing myself to the
statement that this has been a night which none of us present here will
ever forget. Miss Nicholas has given us, ladies and gentlemen, a banquet.
I repeat, a banquet. There has been alcoholic refreshment. I do not know
where it came from: I do not ask how it was procured, but we have had it.
Miss Nicholas...”

Mr. Faucitt paused to puff at his cigar. Sally's brother Fillmore
suppressed a yawn and glanced at his watch. Sally continued to lean
forward raptly. She knew how happy it made the old gentleman to deliver a
formal speech; and though she wished the subject had been different, she
was prepared to listen indefinitely.

“Miss Nicholas,” resumed Mr. Faucitt, lowering his cigar, “... But why,”
he demanded abruptly, “do I call her Miss Nicholas?”

“Because it's her name,” hazarded the taller Murphy.

Mr. Faucitt eyed him with disfavour. He disapproved of the marvellous
brethren on general grounds because, himself a resident of years standing,
he considered that these transients from the vaudeville stage lowered the
tone of the boarding-house; but particularly because the one who had just
spoken had, on his first evening in the place, addressed him as “grandpa.”

“Yes, sir,” he said severely, “it is her name. But she has another name,
sweeter to those who love her, those who worship her, those who have
watched her with the eye of sedulous affection through the three years she
has spent beneath this roof, though that name,” said Mr. Faucitt, lowering
the tone of his address and descending to what might almost be termed
personalities, “may not be familiar to a couple of dud acrobats who have
only been in the place a week-end, thank heaven, and are off to-morrow to
infest some other city. That name,” said Mr. Faucitt, soaring once more to
a loftier plane, “is Sally. Our Sally. For three years our Sally has
flitted about this establishment like—I choose the simile advisedly—like
a ray of sunshine. For three years she has made life for us a brighter,
sweeter thing. And now a sudden access of worldly wealth, happily
synchronizing with her twenty-first birthday, is to remove her from our
midst. From our midst, ladies and gentlemen, but not from our hearts. And
I think I may venture to hope, to prognosticate, that, whatever lofty
sphere she may adorn in the future, to whatever heights in the social
world she may soar, she will still continue to hold a corner in her own
golden heart for the comrades of her Bohemian days. Ladies and gentlemen,
I give you our hostess, Miss Sally Nicholas, coupled with the name of our
old friend, her brother Fillmore.”

Sally, watching her brother heave himself to his feet as the cheers died
away, felt her heart beat a little faster with anticipation. Fillmore was
a fluent young man, once a power in his college debating society, and it
was for that reason that she had insisted on his coming here tonight.

She had guessed that Mr. Faucitt, the old dear, would say all sorts of
delightful things about her, and she had mistrusted her ability to make a
fitting reply. And it was imperative that a fitting reply should proceed
from someone. She knew Mr. Faucitt so well. He looked on these occasions
rather in the light of scenes from some play; and, sustaining his own part
in them with such polished grace, was certain to be pained by anything in
the nature of an anti-climax after he should have ceased to take the
stage. Eloquent himself, he must be answered with eloquence, or his whole
evening would be spoiled.

Fillmore Nicholas smoothed a wrinkle out of his white waistcoat; and
having rested one podgy hand on the table-cloth and the thumb of the other
in his pocket, glanced down the table with eyes so haughtily drooping that
Sally's fingers closed automatically about her orange, as she wondered
whether even now it might not be a good thing...

It seems to be one of Nature's laws that the most attractive girls should
have the least attractive brothers. Fillmore Nicholas had not worn well.
At the age of seven he had been an extraordinarily beautiful child, but
after that he had gone all to pieces; and now, at the age of twenty-five,
it would be idle to deny that he was something of a mess. For the three
years preceding his twenty-fifth birthday, restricted means and hard work
had kept his figure in check; but with money there had come an
ever-increasing sleekness. He looked as if he fed too often and too well.

All this, however, Sally was prepared to forgive him, if he would only
make a good speech. She could see Mr. Faucitt leaning back in his chair,
all courteous attention. Rolling periods were meat and drink to the old
gentleman.

Fillmore spoke.

“I'm sure,” said Fillmore, “you don't want a speech... Very good of you to
drink our health. Thank you.”

He sat down.

The effect of these few simple words on the company was marked, but not in
every case identical. To the majority the emotion which they brought was
one of unmixed relief. There had been something so menacing, so easy and
practised, in Fillmore's attitude as he had stood there that the
gloomier-minded had given him at least twenty minutes, and even the
optimists had reckoned that they would be lucky if they got off with ten.
As far as the bulk of the guests were concerned, there was no grumbling.
Fillmore's, to their thinking, had been the ideal after-dinner speech.

Far different was it with Mr. Maxwell Faucitt. The poor old man was
wearing such an expression of surprise and dismay as he might have worn
had somebody unexpectedly pulled the chair from under him. He was feeling
the sick shock which comes to those who tread on a non-existent last
stair. And Sally, catching sight of his face, uttered a sharp wordless
exclamation as if she had seen a child fall down and hurt itself in the
street. The next moment she had run round the table and was standing
behind him with her arms round his neck. She spoke across him with a sob
in her voice.

“My brother,” she stammered, directing a malevolent look at the immaculate
Fillmore, who, avoiding her gaze, glanced down his nose and smoothed
another wrinkle out of his waistcoat, “has not said quite—quite all
I hoped he was going to say. I can't make a speech, but...” Sally gulped,
“... but, I love you all and of course I shall never forget you, and...
and...”

Here Sally kissed Mr. Faucitt and burst into tears.

“There, there,” said Mr. Faucitt, soothingly. The kindest critic could not
have claimed that Sally had been eloquent: nevertheless Mr. Maxwell
Faucitt was conscious of no sense of anti-climax.

2

Sally had just finished telling her brother Fillmore what a pig he was.
The lecture had taken place in the street outside the boarding-house
immediately on the conclusion of the festivities, when Fillmore, who had
furtively collected his hat and overcoat, had stolen forth into the night,
had been overtaken and brought to bay by his justly indignant sister. Her
remarks, punctuated at intervals by bleating sounds from the accused, had
lasted some ten minutes.

As she paused for breath, Fillmore seemed to expand, like an indiarubber
ball which has been sat on. Dignified as he was to the world, he had never
been able to prevent himself being intimidated by Sally when in one of
these moods of hers. He regretted this, for it hurt his self-esteem, but
he did not see how the fact could be altered. Sally had always been like
that. Even the uncle, who after the deaths of their parents had become
their guardian, had never, though a grim man, been able to cope
successfully with Sally. In that last hectic scene three years ago, which
had ended in their going out into the world, together like a second Adam
and Eve, the verbal victory had been hers. And it had been Sally who had
achieved triumph in the one battle which Mrs. Meecher, apparently as a
matter of duty, always brought about with each of her patrons in the first
week of their stay. A sweet-tempered girl, Sally, like most women of a
generous spirit, had cyclonic potentialities.

As she seemed to have said her say, Fillmore kept on expanding till he had
reached the normal, when he ventured upon a speech for the defence.

“What have I done?” demanded Fillmore plaintively.

“Do you want to hear all over again?”

“No, no,” said Fillmore hastily. “But, listen, Sally, you don't understand
my position. You don't seem to realize that all that sort of thing, all
that boarding-house stuff, is a thing of the past. One's got beyond it.
One wants to drop it. One wants to forget it, darn it! Be fair. Look at it
from my viewpoint. I'm going to be a big man...”

“You're going to be a fat man,” said Sally, coldly.

Fillmore refrained from discussing the point. He was sensitive.

“I'm going to do big things,” he substituted. “I've got a deal on at this
very moment which... well, I can't tell you about it, but it's going to be
big. Well, what I'm driving at, is about all this sort of thing”—he
indicated the lighted front of Mrs. Meecher's home-from-home with a wide
gesture—“is that it's over. Finished and done with. These people
were all very well when...”

“... when you'd lost your week's salary at poker and wanted to borrow a
few dollars for the rent.”

“I always paid them back,” protested Fillmore, defensively.

“I did.”

“Well, we did,” said Fillmore, accepting the amendment with the air of a
man who has no time for chopping straws. “Anyway, what I mean is, I don't
see why, just because one has known people at a certain period in one's
life when one was practically down and out, one should have them round
one's neck for ever. One can't prevent people forming an I-knew-him-when
club, but, darn it, one needn't attend the meetings.”

“One's friends...”

“Oh, friends,” said Fillmore. “That's just where all this makes me so
tired. One's in a position where all these people are entitled to call
themselves one's friends, simply because father put it in his will that I
wasn't to get the money till I was twenty-five, instead of letting me have
it at twenty-one like anybody else. I wonder where I should have been by
now if I could have got that money when I was twenty-one.”

“In the poor-house, probably,” said Sally.

Fillmore was wounded.

“Ah! you don't believe in me,” he sighed.

“Oh, you would be all right if you had one thing,” said Sally.

Fillmore passed his qualities in swift review before his mental eye.
Brains? Dash? Spaciousness? Initiative? All present and correct. He
wondered where Sally imagined the hiatus to exist.

“One thing?” he said. “What's that?”

“A nurse.”

Fillmore's sense of injury deepened. He supposed that this was always the
way, that those nearest to a man never believed in his ability till he had
proved it so masterfully that it no longer required the assistance of
faith. Still, it was trying; and there was not much consolation to be
derived from the thought that Napoleon had had to go through this sort of
thing in his day. “I shall find my place in the world,” he said sulkily.

“Oh, you'll find your place all right,” said Sally. “And I'll come round
and bring you jelly and read to you on the days when visitors are
allowed... Oh, hullo.”

The last remark was addressed to a young man who had been swinging briskly
along the sidewalk from the direction of Broadway and who now, coming
abreast of them, stopped.

“Good evening, Mr. Foster.”

“Good evening. Miss Nicholas.”

“You don't know my brother, do you?”

“I don't believe I do.”

“He left the underworld before you came to it,” said Sally. “You wouldn't
think it to look at him, but he was once a prune-eater among the
proletariat, even as you and I. Mrs. Meecher looks on him as a son.”

The two men shook hands. Fillmore was not short, but Gerald Foster with
his lean, well-built figure seemed to tower over him. He was an
Englishman, a man in the middle twenties, clean-shaven, keen-eyed, and
very good to look at. Fillmore, who had recently been going in for one of
those sum-up-your-fellow-man-at-a-glance courses, the better to fit
himself for his career of greatness, was rather impressed. It seemed to
him that this Mr. Foster, like himself, was one of those who Get There. If
you are that kind yourself, you get into the knack of recognizing the
others. It is a sort of gift.

There was a few moments of desultory conversation, of the kind that
usually follows an introduction, and then Fillmore, by no means sorry to
get the chance, took advantage of the coming of this new arrival to remove
himself. He had not enjoyed his chat with Sally, and it seemed probable
that he would enjoy a continuation of it even less. He was glad that Mr.
Foster had happened along at this particular juncture. Excusing himself
briefly, he hurried off down the street.

Sally stood for a minute, watching him till he had disappeared round the
corner. She had a slightly regretful feeling that, now it was too late,
she would think of a whole lot more good things which it would have been
agreeable to say to him. And it had become obvious to her that Fillmore
was not getting nearly enough of that kind of thing said to him nowadays.
Then she dismissed him from her mind and turning to Gerald Foster, slipped
her arm through his.

“Well, Jerry, darling,” she said. “What a shame you couldn't come to the
party. Tell me all about everything.”

3

It was exactly two months since Sally had become engaged to Gerald Foster;
but so rigorously had they kept the secret that nobody at Mrs. Meecher's
so much as suspected it. To Sally, who all her life had hated concealing
things, secrecy of any kind was objectionable: but in this matter Gerald
had shown an odd streak almost of furtiveness in his character. An
announced engagement complicated life. People fussed about you and
bothered you. People either watched you or avoided you. Such were his
arguments, and Sally, who would have glossed over and found excuses for a
disposition on his part towards homicide or arson, put them down to
artistic sensitiveness. There is nobody so sensitive as your artist,
particularly if he be unsuccessful: and when an artist has so little
success that he cannot afford to make a home for the woman he loves, his
sensitiveness presumably becomes great indeed. Putting herself in his
place, Sally could see that a protracted engagement, known by everybody,
would be a standing advertisement of Gerald's failure to make good: and
she acquiesced in the policy of secrecy, hoping that it would not last
long. It seemed absurd to think of Gerald as an unsuccessful man. He had
in him, as the recent Fillmore had perceived, something dynamic. He was
one of those men of whom one could predict that they would succeed very
suddenly and rapidly—overnight, as it were.

“The party,” said Sally, “went off splendidly.” They had passed the
boarding-house door, and were walking slowly down the street. “Everybody
enjoyed themselves, I think, even though Fillmore did his best to spoil
things by coming looking like an advertisement of What The Smart Men Will
Wear This Season. You didn't see his waistcoat just now. He had covered it
up. Conscience, I suppose. It was white and bulgy and gleaming and full up
of pearl buttons and everything. I saw Augustus Bartlett curl up like a
burnt feather when he caught sight of it. Still, time seemed to heal the
wound, and everybody relaxed after a bit. Mr. Faucitt made a speech and I
made a speech and cried, and...oh, it was all very festive. It only needed
you.”

“I wish I could have come. I had to go to that dinner, though. Sally...”
Gerald paused, and Sally saw that he was electric with suppressed
excitement. “Sally, the play's going to be put on!”

Sally gave a little gasp. She had lived this moment in anticipation for
weeks. She had always known that sooner or later this would happen. She
had read his plays over and over again, and was convinced that they were
wonderful. Of course, hers was a biased view, but then Elsa Doland also
admired them; and Elsa's opinion was one that carried weight. Elsa was
another of those people who were bound to succeed suddenly. Even old Mr.
Faucitt, who was a stern judge of acting and rather inclined to consider
that nowadays there was no such thing, believed that she was a girl with a
future who would do something big directly she got her chance.

“Jerry!” She gave his arm a hug. “How simply terrific! Then Goble and Kohn
have changed their minds after all and want it? I knew they would.”

A slight cloud seemed to dim the sunniness of the author's mood.

“No, not that one,” he said reluctantly. “No hope there, I'm afraid. I saw
Goble this morning about that, and he said it didn't add up right. The one
that's going to be put on is 'The Primrose Way.' You remember? It's got a
big part for a girl in it.”

“Of course! The one Elsa liked so much. Well, that's just as good. Who's
going to do it? I thought you hadn't sent it out again.”

“Well, it happens...” Gerald hesitated once more. “It seems that this man
I was dining with to-night—a man named Cracknell...”

“Cracknell? Not the Cracknell?”

“The Cracknell?”

“The one people are always talking about. The man they call the
Millionaire Kid.”

“Yes. Why, do you know him?”

“He was at Harvard with Fillmore. I never saw him, but he must be rather a
painful person.”

“Oh, he's all right. Not much brains, of course, but—well, he's all
right. And, anyway, he wants to put the play on.”

“Well, that's splendid,” said Sally: but she could not get the right ring
of enthusiasm into her voice. She had had ideals for Gerald. She had
dreamed of him invading Broadway triumphantly under the banner of one of
the big managers whose name carried a prestige, and there seemed something
unworthy in this association with a man whose chief claim to eminence lay
in the fact that he was credited by metropolitan gossip with possessing
the largest private stock of alcohol in existence.

“I thought you would be pleased,” said Gerald.

“Oh, I am,” said Sally.

With the buoyant optimism which never deserted her for long, she had
already begun to cast off her momentary depression. After all, did it
matter who financed a play so long as it obtained a production? A manager
was simply a piece of machinery for paying the bills; and if he had money
for that purpose, why demand asceticism and the finer sensibilities from
him? The real thing that mattered was the question of who was going to
play the leading part, that deftly drawn character which had so excited
the admiration of Elsa Doland. She sought information on this point.

“Who will play Ruth?” she asked. “You must have somebody wonderful. It
needs a tremendously clever woman. Did Mr. Cracknell say anything about
that?”

“Oh, yes, we discussed that, of course.”

“Well?”

“Well, it seems...” Again Sally noticed that odd, almost stealthy
embarrassment. Gerald appeared unable to begin a sentence to-night without
feeling his way into it like a man creeping cautiously down a dark alley.
She noticed it the more because it was so different from his usual direct
method. Gerald, as a rule, was not one of those who apologize for
themselves. He was forthright and masterful and inclined to talk to her
from a height. To-night he seemed different.

He broke off, was silent for a moment, and began again with a question.

“Do you know Mabel Hobson?”

“Mabel Hobson? I've seen her in the 'Follies,' of course.”

Sally started. A suspicion had stung her, so monstrous that its absurdity
became manifest the moment it had formed. And yet was it absurd? Most
Broadway gossip filtered eventually into the boarding-house, chiefly
through the medium of that seasoned sport, the mild young man who thought
so highly of the redoubtable Benny Whistler, and she was aware that the
name of Reginald Cracknell, which was always getting itself linked with
somebody, had been coupled with that of Miss Hobson. It seemed likely that
in this instance rumour spoke truth, for the lady was of that compellingly
blonde beauty which attracts the Cracknells of this world. But even so...

“It seems that Cracknell...” said Gerald. “Apparently this man
Cracknell...” He was finding Sally's bright, horrified gaze somewhat
trying. “Well, the fact is Cracknell believes in Mabel Hobson...and...
well, he thinks this part would suit her.”

“Oh, Jerry!”

Could infatuation go to such a length? Could even the spacious heart of a
Reginald Cracknell so dominate that gentleman's small size in heads as to
make him entrust a part like Ruth in “The Primrose Way” to one who, when
desired by the producer of her last revue to carry a bowl of roses across
the stage and place it on a table, had rebelled on the plea that she had
not been engaged as a dancer? Surely even lovelorn Reginald could perceive
that this was not the stuff of which great emotional actresses are made.

“Oh, Jerry!” she said again.

There was an uncomfortable silence. They turned and walked back in the
direction of the boarding-house. Somehow Gerald's arm had managed to get
itself detached from Sally's. She was conscious of a curious dull ache
that was almost like a physical pain.

“Jerry! Is it worth it?” she burst out vehemently.

The question seemed to sting the young man into something like his usual
decisive speech.

“Worth it? Of course it's worth it. It's a Broadway production. That's all
that matters. Good heavens! I've been trying long enough to get a play on
Broadway, and it isn't likely that I'm going to chuck away my chance when
it comes along just because one might do better in the way of casting.”

“But, Jerry! Mabel Hobson! It's... it's murder! Murder in the first
degree.”

“Nonsense. She'll be all right. The part will play itself. Besides, she
has a personality and a following, and Cracknell will spend all the money
in the world to make the thing a success. And it will be a start, whatever
happens. Of course, it's worth it.”

Fillmore would have been impressed by this speech. He would have
recognized and respected in it the unmistakable ring which characterizes
even the lightest utterances of those who get there. On Sally it had not
immediately that effect. Nevertheless, her habit of making the best of
things, working together with that primary article of her creed that the
man she loved could do no wrong, succeeded finally in raising her spirits.
Of course Jerry was right. It would have been foolish to refuse a contract
because all its clauses were not ideal.

“You old darling,” she said affectionately attaching herself to the vacant
arm once more and giving it a penitent squeeze, “you're quite right. Of
course you are. I can see it now. I was only a little startled at first.
Everything's going to be wonderful. Let's get all our chickens out and
count 'em. How are you going to spend the money?”

“I know how I'm going to spend a dollar of it,” said Gerald completely
restored.

“I mean the big money. What's a dollar?”

“It pays for a marriage-licence.”

Sally gave his arm another squeeze.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said. “Look at this man. Observe him. My
partner!”

CHAPTER II. ENTER GINGER

1

Sally was sitting with her back against a hillock of golden sand, watching
with half-closed eyes the denizens of Roville-sur-Mer at their familiar
morning occupations. At Roville, as at most French seashore resorts, the
morning is the time when the visiting population assembles in force on the
beach. Whiskered fathers of families made cheerful patches of colour in
the foreground. Their female friends and relatives clustered in groups
under gay parasols. Dogs roamed to and fro, and children dug industriously
with spades, ever and anon suspending their labours in order to smite one
another with these handy implements. One of the dogs, a poodle of military
aspect, wandered up to Sally: and discovering that she was in possession
of a box of sweets, decided to remain and await developments.

Few things are so pleasant as the anticipation of them, but Sally's
vacation had proved an exception to this rule. It had been a magic month
of lazy happiness. She had drifted luxuriously from one French town to
another, till the charm of Roville, with its blue sky, its Casino, its
snow-white hotels along the Promenade, and its general glitter and gaiety,
had brought her to a halt. Here she could have stayed indefinitely, but
the voice of America was calling her back. Gerald had written to say that
“The Primrose Way” was to be produced in Detroit, preliminary to its New
York run, so soon that, if she wished to see the opening, she must return
at once. A scrappy, hurried, unsatisfactory letter, the letter of a busy
man: but one that Sally could not ignore. She was leaving Roville
to-morrow.

To-day, however, was to-day: and she sat and watched the bathers with a
familiar feeling of peace, revelling as usual in the still novel sensation
of having nothing to do but bask in the warm sunshine and listen to the
faint murmur of the little waves.

But, if there was one drawback, she had discovered, to a morning on the
Roville plage, it was that you had a tendency to fall asleep: and this is
a degrading thing to do so soon after breakfast, even if you are on a
holiday. Usually, Sally fought stoutly against the temptation, but to-day
the sun was so warm and the whisper of the waves so insinuating that she
had almost dozed off, when she was aroused by voices close at hand. There
were many voices on the beach, both near and distant, but these were
talking English, a novelty in Roville, and the sound of the familiar
tongue jerked Sally back from the borders of sleep. A few feet away, two
men had seated themselves on the sand.

From the first moment she had set out on her travels, it had been one of
Sally's principal amusements to examine the strangers whom chance threw in
her way and to try by the light of her intuition to fit them out with
characters and occupations: nor had she been discouraged by an almost
consistent failure to guess right. Out of the corner of her eye she
inspected these two men.

The first of the pair did not attract her. He was a tall, dark man whose
tight, precise mouth and rather high cheeks bones gave him an appearance
vaguely sinister. He had the dusky look of the clean-shaven man whose life
is a perpetual struggle with a determined beard. He certainly shaved twice
a day, and just as certainly had the self-control not to swear when he cut
himself. She could picture him smiling nastily when this happened.

“Hard,” diagnosed Sally. “I shouldn't like him. A lawyer or something, I
think.”

She turned to the other and found herself looking into his eyes. This was
because he had been staring at Sally with the utmost intentness ever since
his arrival. His mouth had opened slightly. He had the air of a man who,
after many disappointments, has at last found something worth looking at.

“Rather a dear,” decided Sally.

He was a sturdy, thick-set young man with an amiable, freckled face and
the reddest hair Sally had ever seen. He had a square chin, and at one
angle of the chin a slight cut. And Sally was convinced that, however he
had behaved on receipt of that wound, it had not been with superior
self-control.

“A temper, I should think,” she meditated. “Very quick, but soon over. Not
very clever, I should say, but nice.”

She looked away, finding his fascinated gaze a little embarrassing.

The dark man, who in the objectionably competent fashion which, one felt,
characterized all his actions, had just succeeded in lighting a cigarette
in the teeth of a strong breeze, threw away the match and resumed the
conversation, which had presumably been interrupted by the process of
sitting down.

“And how is Scrymgeour?” he inquired.

“Oh, all right,” replied the young man with red hair absently. Sally was
looking straight in front of her, but she felt that his eyes were still
busy.

“I was surprised at his being here. He told me he meant to stay in Paris.”

There was a slight pause. Sally gave the attentive poodle a piece of
nougat.

“I say,” observed the red-haired young man in clear, penetrating tones
that vibrated with intense feeling, “that's the prettiest girl I've seen
in my life!”

2

At this frank revelation of the red-haired young man's personal opinions,
Sally, though considerably startled, was not displeased. A broad-minded
girl, the outburst seemed to her a legitimate comment on a matter of
public interest. The young man's companion, on the other hand, was
unmixedly shocked.

“My dear fellow!” he ejaculated.

“Oh, it's all right,” said the red-haired young man, unmoved. “She can't
understand. There isn't a bally soul in this dashed place that can speak a
word of English. If I didn't happen to remember a few odd bits of French,
I should have starved by this time. That girl,” he went on, returning to
the subject most imperatively occupying his mind, “is an absolute topper!
I give you my solemn word I've never seen anybody to touch her. Look at
those hands and feet. You don't get them outside France. Of course, her
mouth is a bit wide,” he said reluctantly.

Sally's immobility, added to the other's assurance concerning the
linguistic deficiencies of the inhabitants of Roville, seemed to reassure
the dark man. He breathed again. At no period of his life had he ever
behaved with anything but the most scrupulous correctness himself, but he
had quailed at the idea of being associated even remotely with
incorrectness in another. It had been a black moment for him when the
red-haired young man had uttered those few kind words.

“Still you ought to be careful,” he said austerely.

He looked at Sally, who was now dividing her attention between the poodle
and a raffish-looking mongrel, who had joined the party, and returned to
the topic of the mysterious Scrymgeour.

“How is Scrymgeour's dyspepsia?”

The red-haired young man seemed but faintly interested in the vicissitudes
of Scrymgeour's interior.

“Do you notice the way her hair sort of curls over her ears?” he said.
“Eh? Oh, pretty much the same, I think.”

“What hotel are you staying at?”

“The Normandie.”

Sally, dipping into the box for another chocolate cream, gave an
imperceptible start. She, too, was staying at the Normandie. She presumed
that her admirer was a recent arrival, for she had seen nothing of him at
the hotel.

“The Normandie?” The dark man looked puzzled. “I know Roville pretty well
by report, but I've never heard of any Hotel Normandie. Where is it?”

“It's a little shanty down near the station. Not much of a place. Still,
it's cheap, and the cooking's all right.”

His companion's bewilderment increased.

“What on earth is a man like Scrymgeour doing there?” he said. Sally was
conscious of an urgent desire to know more and more about the absent
Scrymgeour. Constant repetition of his name had made him seem almost like
an old friend. “If there's one thing he's fussy about...”

“There are at least eleven thousand things he's fussy about,” interrupted
the red-haired young man disapprovingly. “Jumpy old blighter!”

“If there's one thing he's particular about, it's the sort of hotel he
goes to. Ever since I've known him he has always wanted the best. I should
have thought he would have gone to the Splendide.” He mused on this
problem in a dissatisfied sort of way for a moment, then seemed to
reconcile himself to the fact that a rich man's eccentricities must be
humoured. “I'd like to see him again. Ask him if he will dine with me at
the Splendide to-night. Say eight sharp.”

Sally, occupied with her dogs, whose numbers had now been augmented by a
white terrier with a black patch over its left eye, could not see the
young man's face: but his voice, when he replied, told her that something
was wrong. There was a false airiness in it.

“Oh, Scrymgeour isn't in Roville.”

“No? Where is he?”

“Paris, I believe.”

“What!” The dark man's voice sharpened. He sounded as though he were
cross-examining a reluctant witness. “Then why aren't you there? What are
you doing here? Did he give you a holiday?”

“Yes, he did.”

“When do you rejoin him?”

“I don't.”

“What!”

The red-haired young man's manner was not unmistakably dogged.

“Well, if you want to know,” he said, “the old blighter fired me the day
before yesterday.”

3

There was a shuffling of sand as the dark man sprang up. Sally, intent on
the drama which was unfolding itself beside her, absent-mindedly gave the
poodle a piece of nougat which should by rights have gone to the terrier.
She shot a swift glance sideways, and saw the dark man standing in an
attitude rather reminiscent of the stern father of melodrama about to
drive his erring daughter out into the snow. The red-haired young man,
outwardly stolid, was gazing before him down the beach at a fat bather in
an orange suit who, after six false starts, was now actually in the water,
floating with the dignity of a wrecked balloon.

“Do you mean to tell me,” demanded the dark man, “that, after all the
trouble the family took to get you what was practically a sinecure with
endless possibilities if you only behaved yourself, you have deliberately
thrown away...” A despairing gesture completed the sentence. “Good God,
you're hopeless!”

The red-haired young man made no reply. He continued to gaze down the
beach. Of all outdoor sports, few are more stimulating than watching
middle-aged Frenchmen bathe. Drama, action, suspense, all are here. From
the first stealthy testing of the water with an apprehensive toe to the
final seal-like plunge, there is never a dull moment. And apart from the
excitement of the thing, judging it from a purely aesthetic standpoint,
his must be a dull soul who can fail to be uplifted by the spectacle of a
series of very stout men with whiskers, seen in tight bathing suits
against a background of brightest blue. Yet the young man with red hair,
recently in the employment of Mr. Scrymgeour, eyed this free circus
without any enjoyment whatever.

“It's maddening! What are you going to do? What do you expect us to do?
Are we to spend our whole lives getting you positions which you won't
keep? I can tell you we're... it's monstrous! It's sickening! Good God!”

And with these words the dark man, apparently feeling, as Sally had
sometimes felt in the society of her brother Fillmore, the futility of
mere language, turned sharply and stalked away up the beach, the dignity
of his exit somewhat marred a moment later by the fact of his straw hat
blowing off and being trodden on by a passing child.

He left behind him the sort of electric calm which follows the falling of
a thunderbolt; that stunned calm through which the air seems still to
quiver protestingly. How long this would have lasted one cannot say: for
towards the end of the first minute it was shattered by a purely
terrestrial uproar. With an abruptness heralded only by one short, low
gurgling snarl, there sprang into being the prettiest dog fight that
Roville had seen that season.

It was the terrier with the black patch who began it. That was Sally's
opinion: and such, one feels, will be the verdict of history. His best
friend, anxious to make out a case for him, could not have denied that he
fired the first gun of the campaign. But we must be just. The fault was
really Sally's. Absorbed in the scene which had just concluded and acutely
inquisitive as to why the shadowy Scrymgeour had seen fit to dispense with
the red-haired young man's services, she had thrice in succession helped
the poodle out of his turn. The third occasion was too much for the
terrier.

There is about any dog fight a wild, gusty fury which affects the average
mortal with something of the helplessness induced by some vast clashing of
the elements. It seems so outside one's jurisdiction. One is oppressed
with a sense of the futility of interference. And this was no ordinary dog
fight. It was a stunning mêlée, which would have excited favourable
comment even among the blasé residents of a negro quarter or the not
easily-pleased critics of a Lancashire mining-village. From all over the
beach dogs of every size, breed, and colour were racing to the scene: and
while some of these merely remained in the ringside seats and barked, a
considerable proportion immediately started fighting one another on
general principles, well content to be in action without bothering about
first causes. The terrier had got the poodle by the left hind-leg and was
restating his war-aims. The raffish mongrel was apparently endeavouring to
fletcherize a complete stranger of the Sealyham family.

Sally was frankly unequal to the situation, as were the entire crowd of
spectators who had come galloping up from the water's edge. She had been
paralysed from the start. Snarling bundles bumped against her legs and
bounced away again, but she made no move. Advice in fluent French rent the
air. Arms waved, and well-filled bathing suits leaped up and down. But
nobody did anything practical until in the centre of the theatre of war
there suddenly appeared the red-haired young man.

The only reason why dog fights do not go on for ever is that Providence
has decided that on each such occasion there shall always be among those
present one Master Mind; one wizard who, whatever his shortcomings in
other battles of life, is in this single particular sphere competent and
dominating. At Roville-sur-Mer it was the red-haired young man. His dark
companion might have turned from him in disgust: his services might not
have seemed worth retaining by the haughty Scrymgeour: he might be a pain
in the neck to “the family”; but he did know how to stop a dog fight. From
the first moment of his intervention calm began to steal over the scene.
He had the same effect on the almost inextricably entwined belligerents
as, in mediaeval legend, the Holy Grail, sliding down the sunbeam, used to
have on battling knights. He did not look like a dove of peace, but the
most captious could not have denied that he brought home the goods. There
was a magic in his soothing hands, a spell in his voice: and in a shorter
time than one would have believed possible dog after dog had been sorted
out and calmed down; until presently all that was left of Armageddon was
one solitary small Scotch terrier, thoughtfully licking a chewed leg. The
rest of the combatants, once more in their right mind and wondering what
all the fuss was about, had been captured and haled away in a whirl of
recrimination by voluble owners.

Having achieved this miracle, the young man turned to Sally. Gallant, one
might say reckless, as he had been a moment before, he now gave
indications of a rather pleasing shyness. He braced himself with that
painful air of effort which announces to the world that an Englishman is
about to speak a language other than his own.

“J'espère,” he said, having swallowed once or twice to brace himself up
for the journey through the jungle of a foreign tongue, “J'espère que vous
n'êtes pas—oh, dammit, what's the word—J'espère que vous
n'êtes pas blessée?”

“Blessée?”

“Yes, blessée. Wounded. Hurt, don't you know. Bitten. Oh, dash it.
J'espère...”

“Oh, bitten!” said Sally, dimpling. “Oh, no, thanks very much. I wasn't
bitten. And I think it was awfully brave of you to save all our lives.”

The compliment seemed to pass over the young man's head. He stared at
Sally with horrified eyes. Over his amiable face there swept a vivid
blush. His jaw dropped.

“Oh, my sainted aunt!” he ejaculated.

Then, as if the situation was too much for him and flight the only
possible solution, he spun round and disappeared at a walk so rapid that
it was almost a run. Sally watched him go and was sorry that he had torn
himself away. She still wanted to know why Scrymgeour had fired him.

4

Bedtime at Roville is an hour that seems to vary according to one's
proximity to the sea. The gilded palaces along the front keep deplorable
hours, polluting the night air till dawn with indefatigable jazz: but at
the pensions of the economical like the Normandie, early to bed is the
rule. True, Jules, the stout young native who combined the offices of
night-clerk and lift attendant at that establishment, was on duty in the
hall throughout the night, but few of the Normandie's patrons made use of
his services.

Sally, entering shortly before twelve o'clock on the night of the day on
which the dark man, the red-haired young man, and their friend Scrymgeour
had come into her life, found the little hall dim and silent. Through the
iron cage of the lift a single faint bulb glowed: another, over the desk
in the far corner, illuminated the upper half of Jules, slumbering in a
chair. Jules seemed to Sally to be on duty in some capacity or other all
the time. His work, like women's, was never done. He was now restoring his
tissues with a few winks of much-needed beauty sleep. Sally, who had been
to the Casino to hear the band and afterwards had strolled on the moonlit
promenade, had a guilty sense of intrusion.

As she stood there, reluctant to break in on Jules' rest—for her
sympathetic heart, always at the disposal of the oppressed, had long ached
for this overworked peon—she was relieved to hear footsteps in the
street outside, followed by the opening of the front door. If Jules would
have had to wake up anyway, she felt her sense of responsibility lessened.
The door, having opened, closed again with a bang. Jules stirred, gurgled,
blinked, and sat up, and Sally, turning, perceived that the new arrival
was the red-haired young man.

“Oh, good evening,” said Sally welcomingly.

The young man stopped, and shuffled uncomfortably. The morning's
happenings were obviously still green in his memory. He had either not
ceased blushing since their last meeting or he was celebrating their
reunion by beginning to blush again: for his face was a familiar scarlet.

“Er—good evening,” he said, disentangling his feet, which, in the
embarrassment of the moment, had somehow got coiled up together.

“Or bon soir, I suppose you would say,” murmured Sally.

The young man acknowledged receipt of this thrust by dropping his hat and
tripping over it as he stooped to pick it up.

Jules, meanwhile, who had been navigating in a sort of somnambulistic
trance in the neighbourhood of the lift, now threw back the cage with a
rattle.

“It's a shame to have woken you up,” said Sally, commiseratingly, stepping
in.

Jules did not reply, for the excellent reason that he had not been woken
up. Constant practice enabled him to do this sort of work without breaking
his slumber. His brain, if you could call it that, was working
automatically. He had shut up the gate with a clang and was tugging
sluggishly at the correct rope, so that the lift was going slowly up
instead of retiring down into the basement, but he was not awake.

Sally and the red-haired young man sat side by side on the small seat,
watching their conductor's efforts. After the first spurt, conversation
had languished. Sally had nothing of immediate interest to say, and her
companion seemed to be one of these strong, silent men you read about.
Only a slight snore from Jules broke the silence.

At the third floor Sally leaned forward and prodded Jules in the lower
ribs. All through her stay at Roville, she had found in dealing with the
native population that actions spoke louder than words. If she wanted
anything in a restaurant or at a shop, she pointed; and, when she wished
the lift to stop, she prodded the man in charge. It was a system worth a
dozen French conversation books.

Jules brought the machine to a halt: and it was at this point that he
should have done the one thing connected with his professional activities
which he did really well—the opening, to wit, of the iron cage.
There are ways of doing this. Jules' was the right way. He was accustomed
to do it with a flourish, and generally remarked “V'la!” in a modest but
self-congratulatory voice as though he would have liked to see another man
who could have put through a job like that. Jules' opinion was that he
might not be much to look at, but that he could open a lift door.

To-night, however, it seemed as if even this not very exacting feat was
beyond his powers. Instead of inserting his key in the lock, he stood
staring in an attitude of frozen horror. He was a man who took most things
in life pretty seriously, and whatever was the little difficulty just now
seemed to have broken him all up.

“There appears,” said Sally, turning to her companion, “to be a hitch.
Would you mind asking what's the matter? I don't know any French myself
except 'oo la la!'”

The young man, thus appealed to, nerved himself to the task. He eyed the
melancholy Jules doubtfully, and coughed in a strangled sort of way.

“Oh, esker... esker vous...”

“Don't weaken,” said Sally. “I think you've got him going.”

“Esker vous... Pourquoi vous ne... I mean ne vous... that is to say, quel
est le raison...”

He broke off here, because at this point Jules began to explain. He
explained very rapidly and at considerable length. The fact that neither
of his hearers understood a word of what he was saying appeared not to
have impressed itself upon him. Or, if he gave a thought to it, he
dismissed the objection as trifling. He wanted to explain, and he
explained. Words rushed from him like water from a geyser. Sounds which
you felt you would have been able to put a meaning to if he had detached
them from the main body and repeated them slowly, went swirling down the
stream and were lost for ever.

“Stop him!” said Sally firmly.

The red-haired young man looked as a native of Johnstown might have looked
on being requested to stop that city's celebrated flood.

“Stop him?”

“Yes. Blow a whistle or something.”

Out of the depths of the young man's memory there swam to the surface a
single word—a word which he must have heard somewhere or read
somewhere: a legacy, perhaps, from long-vanished school-days.

“Zut!” he barked, and instantaneously Jules turned himself off at the
main. There was a moment of dazed silence, such as might occur in a
boiler-factory if the works suddenly shut down.

“Quick! Now you've got him!” cried Sally. “Ask him what he's talking about—if
he knows, which I doubt—and tell him to speak slowly. Then we shall
get somewhere.”

The young man nodded intelligently. The advice was good.

“Lentement,” he said. “Parlez lentement. Pas si—you know what I mean—pas
si dashed vite!”

“Ah-a-ah!” cried Jules, catching the idea on the fly. “Lentement. Ah, oui,
lentement.”

There followed a lengthy conversation which, while conveying nothing to
Sally, seemed intelligible to the red-haired linguist.

“The silly ass,” he was able to announce some few minutes later, “has made
a bloomer. Apparently he was half asleep when we came in, and he shoved us
into the lift and slammed the door, forgetting that he had left the keys
on the desk.”

“I see,” said Sally. “So we're shut in?”

“I'm afraid so. I wish to goodness,” said the young man, “I knew French
well. I'd curse him with some vim and not a little animation, the chump! I
wonder what 'blighter' is in French,” he said, meditating.

“It's the merest suggestion,” said Sally, “but oughtn't we to do
something?”

“What could we do?”

“Well, for one thing, we might all utter a loud yell. It would scare most
of the people in the hotel to death, but there might be a survivor or two
who would come and investigate and let us out.”

“What a ripping idea!” said the young man, impressed.

“I'm glad you like it. Now tell him the main out-line, or he'll think
we've gone mad.”

The young man searched for words, and eventually found some which
expressed his meaning lamely but well enough to cause Jules to nod in a
depressed sort of way.

“Fine!” said Sally. “Now, all together at the word 'three.' One—two—Oh,
poor darling!” she broke off. “Look at him!”

In the far corner of the lift, the emotional Jules was sobbing silently
into the bunch of cotton-waste which served him in the office of a
pocket-handkerchief. His broken-hearted gulps echoed hollowly down the
shaft.

5

In these days of cheap books of instruction on every subject under the
sun, we most of us know how to behave in the majority of life's little
crises. We have only ourselves to blame if we are ignorant of what to do
before the doctor comes, of how to make a dainty winter coat for baby out
of father's last year's under-vest and of the best method of coping with
the cold mutton. But nobody yet has come forward with practical advice as
to the correct method of behaviour to be adopted when a lift-attendant
starts crying. And Sally and her companion, as a consequence, for a few
moments merely stared at each other helplessly.

“Poor darling!” said Sally, finding speech. “Ask him what's the matter.”

The young man looked at her doubtfully.

“You know,” he said, “I don't enjoy chatting with this blighter. I mean to
say, it's a bit of an effort. I don't know why it is, but talking French
always makes me feel as if my nose were coming off. Couldn't we just leave
him to have his cry out by himself?”

“The idea!” said Sally. “Have you no heart? Are you one of those fiends in
human shape?”

He turned reluctantly to Jules, and paused to overhaul his vocabulary.

“You ought to be thankful for this chance,” said Sally. “It's the only
real way of learning French, and you're getting a lesson for nothing. What
did he say then?”

“Something about losing something, it seemed to me. I thought I caught the
word perdu.”

“But that means a partridge, doesn't it? I'm sure I've seen it on the
menus.”

“Would he talk about partridges at a time like this?”

“He might. The French are extraordinary people.”

“Well, I'll have another go at him. But he's a difficult chap to chat
with. If you give him the least encouragement, he sort of goes off like a
rocket.” He addressed another question to the sufferer, and listened
attentively to the voluble reply.

“Oh!” he said with sudden enlightenment. “Your job?” He turned to Sally.
“I got it that time,” he said. “The trouble is, he says, that if we yell
and rouse the house, we'll get out all right, but he will lose his job,
because this is the second time this sort of thing has happened, and they
warned him last time that once more would mean the push.”

“Then we mustn't dream of yelling,” said Sally, decidedly. “It means a
pretty long wait, you know. As far as I can gather, there's just a chance
of somebody else coming in later, in which case he could let us out. But
it's doubtful. He rather thinks that everybody has gone to roost.”

“Well, we must try it. I wouldn't think of losing the poor man his job.
Tell him to take the car down to the ground-floor, and then we'll just sit
and amuse ourselves till something happens. We've lots to talk about. We
can tell each other the story of our lives.”

Jules, cheered by his victims' kindly forbearance, lowered the car to the
ground floor, where, after a glance of infinite longing at the keys on the
distant desk, the sort of glance which Moses must have cast at the
Promised Land from the summit of Mount Pisgah, he sagged down in a heap
and resumed his slumbers. Sally settled herself as comfortably as possible
in her corner.

“You'd better smoke,” she said. “It will be something to do.”

“Thanks awfully.”

“And now,” said Sally, “tell me why Scrymgeour fired you.”

Little by little, under the stimulating influence of this nocturnal
adventure, the red-haired young man had lost that shy confusion which had
rendered him so ill at ease when he had encountered Sally in the hall of
the hotel; but at this question embarrassment gripped him once more.
Another of those comprehensive blushes of his raced over his face, and he
stammered.

“I say, I'm glad... I'm fearfully sorry about that, you know!”

“About Scrymgeour?”

“You know what I mean. I mean, about making such a most ghastly ass of
myself this morning. I... I never dreamed you understood English.”

“Why, I didn't object. I thought you were very nice and complimentary. Of
course, I don't know how many girls you've seen in your life, but...”

“No, I say, don't! It makes me feel such a chump.”

“And I'm sorry about my mouth. It is wide. But I know you're a fair-minded
man and realize that it isn't my fault.”

“Don't rub it in,” pleaded the young man. “As a matter of fact, if you
want to know, I think your mouth is absolutely perfect. I think,” he
proceeded, a little feverishly, “that you are the most indescribable
topper that ever...”

“You were going to tell me about Scrymgeour,” said Sally.

The young man blinked as if he had collided with some hard object while
sleep-walking. Eloquence had carried him away.

“Scrymgeour?” he said. “Oh, that would bore you.”

“Don't be silly,” said Sally reprovingly. “Can't you realize that we're
practically castaways on a desert island? There's nothing to do till
to-morrow but talk about ourselves. I want to hear all about you, and then
I'll tell you all about myself. If you feel diffident about starting the
revelations, I'll begin. Better start with names. Mine is Sally Nicholas.
What's yours?”

“Mine? Oh, ah, yes, I see what you mean.”

“I thought you would. I put it as clearly as I could. Well, what is it?”

“Kemp.”

“And the first name?”

“Well, as a matter of fact,” said the young man, “I've always rather
hushed up my first name, because when I was christened they worked a
low-down trick on me!”

“You can't shock me,” said Sally, encouragingly. “My father's name was
Ezekiel, and I've a brother who was christened Fillmore.”

Mr. Kemp brightened. “Well, mine isn't as bad as that... No, I don't mean
that,” he broke off apologetically. “Both awfully jolly names, of
course...”

“Get on,” said Sally.

“Well, they called me Lancelot. And, of course, the thing is that I don't
look like a Lancelot and never shall. My pals,” he added in a more
cheerful strain, “call me Ginger.”

“I don't blame them,” said Sally.

“Perhaps you wouldn't mind thinking of me as Ginger?'' suggested the young
man diffidently.

“Certainly.”

“That's awfully good of you.”

“Not at all.”

Jules stirred in his sleep and grunted. No other sound came to disturb the
stillness of the night.

“You were going to tell me about yourself?” said Mr. Lancelot (Ginger)
Kemp.

“I'm going to tell you all about myself,” said Sally, “not because I think
it will interest you...”

“Oh, it will!”

“Not, I say, because I think it will interest you...”

“It will, really.”

Sally looked at him coldly.

“Is this a duet?” she inquired, “or have I the floor?”

“I'm awfully sorry.”

“Not, I repeat for the third time, because I think It will interest you,
but because if I do you won't have any excuse for not telling me your
life-history, and you wouldn't believe how inquisitive I am. Well, in the
first place, I live in America. I'm over here on a holiday. And it's the
first real holiday I've had in three years—since I left home, in
fact.” Sally paused. “I ran away from home,” she said.

“Good egg!” said Ginger Kemp.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I mean, quite right. I bet you were quite right.”

“When I say home,” Sally went on, “it was only a sort of imitation home,
you know. One of those just-as-good homes which are never as satisfactory
as the real kind. My father and mother both died a good many years ago. My
brother and I were dumped down on the reluctant doorstep of an uncle.”

“Uncles,” said Ginger Kemp, feelingly, “are the devil. I've got an... but
I'm interrupting you.”

“My uncle was our trustee. He had control of all my brother's money and
mine till I was twenty-one. My brother was to get his when he was
twenty-five. My poor father trusted him blindly, and what do you think
happened?”

“Good Lord! The blighter embezzled the lot?”

“No, not a cent. Wasn't it extraordinary! Have you ever heard of a blindly
trusted uncle who was perfectly honest? Well, mine was. But the trouble
was that, while an excellent man to have looking after one's money, he
wasn't a very lovable character. He was very hard. Hard! He was as hard as—well,
nearly as hard as this seat. He hated poor Fill...”

“Phil?”

“I broke it to you just now that my brother's name was Fillmore.”

“Oh, your brother. Oh, ah, yes.”

“He was always picking on poor Fill. And I'm bound to say that Fill rather
laid himself out as what you might call a pickee. He was always getting
into trouble. One day, about three years ago, he was expelled from
Harvard, and my uncle vowed he would have nothing more to do with him. So
I said, if Fill left, I would leave. And, as this seemed to be my uncle's
idea of a large evening, no objection was raised, and Fill and I departed.
We went to New York, and there we've been ever since. About six months'
ago Fill passed the twenty-five mark and collected his money, and last
month I marched past the given point and got mine. So it all ends happily,
you see. Now tell me about yourself.”

“But, I say, you know, dash it, you've skipped a lot. I mean to say, you
must have had an awful time in New York, didn't you? How on earth did you
get along?”

“Oh, we found work. My brother tried one or two things, and finally became
an assistant stage-manager with some theatre people. The only thing I
could do, having been raised in enervating luxury, was ballroom dancing,
so I ball-room danced. I got a job at a place in Broadway called 'The
Flower Garden' as what is humorously called an 'instructress,' as if
anybody could 'instruct' the men who came there. One was lucky if one
saved one's life and wasn't quashed to death.”

“How perfectly foul!”

“Oh, I don't know. It was rather fun for a while. Still,” said Sally,
meditatively, “I'm not saying I could have held out much longer: I was
beginning to give. I suppose I've been trampled underfoot by more fat men
than any other girl of my age in America. I don't know why it was, but
every man who came in who was a bit overweight seemed to make for me by
instinct. That's why I like to sit on the sands here and watch these
Frenchmen bathing. It's just heavenly to lie back and watch a two hundred
and fifty pound man, coming along and feel that he isn't going to dance
with me.”

“But, I say! How absolutely rotten it must have been for you!”

“Well, I'll tell you one thing. It's going to make me a very domesticated
wife one of these days. You won't find me gadding about in gilded
jazz-palaces! For me, a little place in the country somewhere, with my
knitting and an Elsie book, and bed at half-past nine! And now tell me the
story of your life. And make it long because I'm perfectly certain there's
going to be no relief-expedition. I'm sure the last dweller under this
roof came in years ago. We shall be here till morning.”

“I really think we had better shout, you know.”

“And lose Jules his job? Never!”

“Well, of course, I'm sorry for poor old Jules' troubles, but I hate to
think of you having to...”

“Now get on with the story,” said Sally.

6

Ginger Kemp exhibited some of the symptoms of a young bridegroom called
upon at a wedding-breakfast to respond to the toast. He moved his feet
restlessly and twisted his fingers.

“I hate talking about myself, you know,” he said.

“So I supposed,” said Sally. “That's why I gave you my autobiography
first, to give you no chance of backing out. Don't be such a shrinking
violet. We're all shipwrecked mariners here. I am intensely interested in
your narrative. And, even if I wasn't, I'd much rather listen to it than
to Jules' snoring.”

“He is snoring a bit, what? Does it annoy you? Shall I stir him?”

“You seem to have an extraordinary brutal streak in your nature,” said
Sally. “You appear to think of nothing else but schemes for harassing poor
Jules. Leave him alone for a second, and start telling me about yourself.”

“Where shall I start?”

“Well, not with your childhood, I think. We'll skip that.”

“Well...” Ginger Kemp knitted his brow, searching for a dramatic opening.
“Well, I'm more or less what you might call an orphan, like you. I mean to
say, both my people are dead and all that sort of thing.”

“Thanks for explaining. That has made it quite clear.”

“I can't remember my mother. My father died when I was in my last year at
Cambridge. I'd been having a most awfully good time at the 'varsity,'”
said Ginger, warming to his theme. “Not thick, you know, but good. I'd got
my rugger and boxing blues and I'd just been picked for scrum-half for
England against the North in the first trial match, and between ourselves
it really did look as if I was more or less of a snip for my
international.”

Sally gazed at him wide eyed.

“Is that good or bad?” she asked.

“Eh?”

“Are you reciting a catalogue of your crimes, or do you expect me to get
up and cheer? What is a rugger blue, to start with?”

“Well, it's... it's a rugger blue, you know.”

“Oh, I see,” said Sally. “You mean a rugger blue.”

“I mean to say, I played rugger—footer—that's to say, football—Rugby
football—for Cambridge, against Oxford. I was scrum-half.”

“And what is a scrum-half?” asked Sally, patiently. “Yes, I know you're
going to say it's a scrum-half, but can't you make it easier?”

“The scrum-half,” said Ginger, “is the half who works the scrum. He slings
the pill out to the fly-half, who starts the three-quarters going. I don't
know if you understand?”

“I don't.”

“It's dashed hard to explain,” said Ginger Kemp, unhappily. “I mean, I
don't think I've ever met anyone before who didn't know what a scrum-half
was.”

“Well, I can see that it has something to do with football, so we'll leave
it at that. I suppose it's something like our quarter-back. And what's an
international?”

“It's called getting your international when you play for England, you
know. England plays Wales, France, Ireland, and Scotland. If it hadn't
been for the smash, I think I should have played for England against
Wales.”

“I see at last. What you're trying to tell me is that you were very good
at football.”

Ginger Kemp blushed warmly.

“Oh, I don't say that. England was pretty short of scrum-halves that
year.”

“What a horrible thing to happen to a country! Still, you were likely to
be picked on the All-England team when the smash came? What was the
smash?”

“Well, it turned out that the poor old pater hadn't left a penny. I never
understood the process exactly, but I'd always supposed that we were
pretty well off; and then it turned out that I hadn't anything at all. I'm
bound to say it was a bit of a jar. I had to come down from Cambridge and
go to work in my uncle's office. Of course, I made an absolute hash of
it.”

“Why, of course?”

“Well, I'm not a very clever sort of chap, you see. I somehow didn't seem
able to grasp the workings. After about a year, my uncle, getting a bit
fed-up, hoofed me out and got me a mastership at a school, and I made a
hash of that. He got me one or two other jobs, and I made a hash of
those.”

“You certainly do seem to be one of our most prominent young hashers!”
gasped Sally.

“I am,” said Ginger, modestly.

There was a silence.

“And what about Scrymgeour?” Sally asked.

“That was the last of the jobs,” said Ginger. “Scrymgeour is a pompous old
ass who thinks he's going to be Prime Minister some day. He's a big bug at
the Bar and has just got into Parliament. My cousin used to devil for him.
That's how I got mixed up with the blighter.”

“Your cousin used...? I wish you would talk English.”

“That was my cousin who was with me on the beach this morning.”

“And what did you say he used to do for Mr. Scrymgeour?”

“Oh, it's called devilling. My cousin's at the Bar, too—one of our
rising nibs, as a matter of fact...”

“I thought he was a lawyer of some kind.”

“He's got a long way beyond it now, but when he started he used to devil
for Scrymgeour—assist him, don't you know. His name's Carmyle, you
know. Perhaps you've heard of him? He's rather a prominent johnny in his
way. Bruce Carmyle, you know.”

“I haven't.”

“Well, he got me this job of secretary to Scrymgeour.”

“And why did Mr. Scrymgeour fire you?”

Ginger Kemp's face darkened. He frowned. Sally, watching him, felt that
she had been right when she had guessed that he had a temper. She liked
him none the worse for it. Mild men did not appeal to her.

“I don't know if you're fond of dogs?” said Ginger.

“I used to be before this morning,” said Sally. “And I suppose I shall be
again in time. For the moment I've had what you might call rather a
surfeit of dogs. But aren't you straying from the point? I asked you why
Mr. Scrymgeour dismissed you.”

“I'm telling you.”

“I'm glad of that. I didn't know.”

“The old brute,” said Ginger, frowning again, “has a dog. A very jolly
little spaniel. Great pal of mine. And Scrymgeour is the sort of fool who
oughtn't to be allowed to own a dog. He's one of those asses who isn't fit
to own a dog. As a matter of fact, of all the blighted, pompous, bullying,
shrivelled-souled old devils...”

“One moment,” said Sally. “I'm getting an impression that you don't like
Mr. Scrymgeour. Am I right?”

“Yes!”

“I thought so. Womanly intuition! Go on.”

“He used to insist on the poor animal doing tricks. I hate seeing a dog do
tricks. Dogs loathe it, you know. They're frightfully sensitive. Well,
Scrymgeour used to make this spaniel of his do tricks—fool-things
that no self-respecting dogs would do: and eventually poor old Billy got
fed up and jibbed. He was too polite to bite, but he sort of shook his
head and crawled under a chair. You'd have thought anyone would have let
it go at that, but would old Scrymgeour? Not a bit of it! Of all the
poisonous...”

“Yes, I know. Go on.”

“Well, the thing ended in the blighter hauling him out from under the
chair and getting more and more shirty, until finally he laid into him
with a stick. That is to say,” said Ginger, coldly accurate, “he started
laying into him with a stick.” He brooded for a moment with knit brows. “A
spaniel, mind you! Can you imagine anyone beating a spaniel? It's like
hitting a little girl. Well, he's a fairly oldish man, you know, and that
hampered me a bit: but I got hold of the stick and broke it into about
eleven pieces, and by great good luck it was a stick he happened to value
rather highly. It had a gold knob and had been presented to him by his
constituents or something. I minced it up a goodish bit, and then I told
him a fair amount about himself. And then—well, after that he shot
me out, and I came here.”

Sally did not speak for a moment.

“You were quite right,” she said at last, in a sober voice that had
nothing in it of her customary flippancy. She paused again. “And what are
you going to do now?” she said.

“I don't know.”

“You'll get something?”

“Oh, yes, I shall get something, I suppose. The family will be pretty
sick, of course.”

“For goodness' sake! Why do you bother about the family?” Sally burst out.
She could not reconcile this young man's flabby dependence on his family
with the enterprise and vigour which he had shown in his dealings with the
unspeakable Scrymgeour. Of course, he had been brought up to look on
himself as a rich man's son and appeared to have drifted as such young men
are wont to do; but even so... “The whole trouble with you,” she said,
embarking on a subject on which she held strong views, “is that...”

Her harangue was interrupted by what—at the Normandie, at one
o'clock in the morning—practically amounted to a miracle. The front
door of the hotel opened, and there entered a young man in evening dress.
Such persons were sufficiently rare at the Normandie, which catered
principally for the staid and middle-aged, and this youth's presence was
due, if one must pause to explain it, to the fact that, in the middle of
his stay at Roville, a disastrous evening at the Casino had so diminished
his funds that he had been obliged to make a hurried shift from the Hotel
Splendide to the humbler Normandie. His late appearance to-night was
caused by the fact that he had been attending a dance at the Splendide,
principally in the hope of finding there some kind-hearted friend of his
prosperity from whom he might borrow.

A rapid-fire dialogue having taken place between Jules and the newcomer,
the keys were handed through the cage, the door opened and the lift was
set once more in motion. And a few minutes later, Sally, suddenly aware of
an overpowering sleepiness, had switched off her light and jumped into
bed. Her last waking thought was a regret that she had not been able to
speak at length to Mr. Ginger Kemp on the subject of enterprise, and
resolve that the address should be delivered at the earliest opportunity.

CHAPTER III. THE DIGNIFIED MR. CARMYLE

1

By six o'clock on the following evening, however, Sally had been forced to
the conclusion that Ginger would have to struggle through life as best he
could without the assistance of her contemplated remarks: for she had seen
nothing of him all day and in another hour she would have left Roville on
the seven-fifteen express which was to take her to Paris, en route for
Cherbourg and the liner whereon she had booked her passage for New York.

It was in the faint hope of finding him even now that, at half-past six,
having conveyed her baggage to the station and left it in charge of an
amiable porter, she paid a last visit to the Casino Municipale. She
disliked the thought of leaving Ginger without having uplifted him. Like
so many alert and active-minded girls, she possessed in a great degree the
quality of interesting herself in—or, as her brother Fillmore
preferred to put it, messing about with—the private affairs of
others. Ginger had impressed her as a man to whom it was worth while to
give a friendly shove on the right path; and it was with much
gratification, therefore, that, having entered the Casino, she perceived a
flaming head shining through the crowd which had gathered at one of the
roulette-tables.

There are two Casinos at Roville-sur-Mer. The one on the Promenade goes in
mostly for sea-air and a mild game called boule. It is the big Casino
Municipale down in the Palace Massena near the railway station which is
the haunt of the earnest gambler who means business; and it was plain to
Sally directly she arrived that Ginger Kemp not only meant business but
was getting results. Ginger was going extremely strong. He was entrenched
behind an opulent-looking mound of square counters: and, even as Sally
looked, a wooden-faced croupier shoved a further instalment across the
table to him at the end of his long rake.

“Epatant!” murmured a wistful man at Sally's side, removing an elbow from
her ribs in order the better to gesticulate. Sally, though no French
scholar, gathered that he was startled and gratified. The entire crowd
seemed to be startled and gratified. There is undoubtedly a certain
altruism in the make-up of the spectators at a Continental roulette-table.
They seem to derive a spiritual pleasure from seeing somebody else win.

The croupier gave his moustache a twist with his left hand and the wheel a
twist with his right, and silence fell again. Sally, who had shifted to a
spot where the pressure of the crowd was less acute, was now able to see
Ginger's face, and as she saw it she gave an involuntary laugh. He looked
exactly like a dog at a rat-hole. His hair seemed to bristle with
excitement. One could almost fancy that his ears were pricked up.

In the tense hush which had fallen on the crowd at the restarting of the
wheel, Sally's laugh rang out with an embarrassing clearness. It had a
marked effect on all those within hearing. There is something almost of
religious ecstasy in the deportment of the spectators at a table where
anyone is having a run of luck at roulette, and if she had guffawed in a
cathedral she could not have caused a more pained consternation. The
earnest worshippers gazed at her with shocked eyes, and Ginger, turning
with a start, saw her and jumped up. As he did so, the ball fell with a
rattling click into a red compartment of the wheel; and, as it ceased to
revolve and it was seen that at last the big winner had picked the wrong
colour, a shuddering groan ran through the congregation like that which
convulses the penitents' bench at a negro revival meeting. More glances of
reproach were cast at Sally. It was generally felt that her injudicious
behaviour had changed Ginger's luck.

The only person who did not appear to be concerned was Ginger himself. He
gathered up his loot, thrust it into his pocket, and elbowed his way to
where Sally stood, now definitely established in the eyes of the crowd as
a pariah. There was universal regret that he had decided to call it a day.
It was to the spectators as though a star had suddenly walked off the
stage in the middle of his big scene; and not even a loud and violent
quarrel which sprang up at this moment between two excitable gamblers over
a disputed five-franc counter could wholly console them.

“I say,” said Ginger, dexterously plucking Sally out of the crowd, “this
is topping, meeting you like this. I've been looking for you everywhere.”

“It's funny you didn't find me, then, for that's where I've been. I was
looking for you.”

“No, really?” Ginger seemed pleased. He led the way to the quiet ante-room
outside the gambling-hall, and they sat down in a corner. It was pleasant
here, with nobody near except the gorgeously uniformed attendant over by
the door. “That was awfully good of you.”

“I felt I must have a talk with you before my train went.”

Ginger started violently.

“Your train? What do you mean?”

“The puff-puff,” explained Sally. “I'm leaving to-night, you know.”

“Leaving?” Ginger looked as horrified as the devoutest of the congregation
of which Sally had just ceased to be a member. “You don't mean leaving?
You're not going away from Roville?”

“I'm afraid so.”

“But why? Where are you going?”

“Back to America. My boat sails from Cherbourg tomorrow.”

“Oh, my aunt!”

“I'm sorry,” said Sally, touched by his concern. She was a warm-hearted
girl and liked being appreciated. “But...”

“I say...” Ginger Kemp turned bright scarlet and glared before him at the
uniformed official, who was regarding their tête-à-tête with the indulgent
eye of one who has been through this sort of thing himself. “I say, look
here, will you marry me?”

2

Sally stared at his vermilion profile in frank amazement. Ginger, she had
realized by this time, was in many ways a surprising young man, but she
had not expected him to be as surprising as this.

“Marry you!”

“You know what I mean.”

“Well, yes, I suppose I do. You allude to the holy state. Yes, I know what
you mean.”

“Then how about it?”

Sally began to regain her composure. Her sense of humour was tickled. She
looked at Ginger gravely. He did not meet her eye, but continued to drink
in the uniformed official, who was by now so carried away by the romance
of it all that he had begun to hum a love-ballad under his breath. The
official could not hear what they were saying, and would not have been
able to understand it even if he could have heard; but he was an expert in
the language of the eyes.

“But isn't this—don't think I am trying to make difficulties—isn't
this a little sudden?”

“It's got to be sudden,” said Ginger Kemp, complainingly. “I thought you
were going to be here for weeks.”

“But, my infant, my babe, has it occurred to you that we are practically
strangers?” She patted his hand tolerantly, causing the uniformed official
to heave a tender sigh. “I see what has happened,” she said. “You're
mistaking me for some other girl, some girl you know really well, and were
properly introduced to. Take a good look at me, and you'll see.”

“If I take a good look at you,” said Ginger, feverishly, “I'm dashed if
I'll answer for the consequences.”

“And this is the man I was going to lecture on 'Enterprise.'”

“You're the most wonderful girl I've ever met, dash it!” said Ginger, his
gaze still riveted on the official by the door “I dare say it is sudden. I
can't help that. I fell in love with you the moment I saw you, and there
you are!”

“But...”

“Now, look here, I know I'm not much of a chap and all that, but... well,
I've just won the deuce of a lot of money in there...”

“Would you buy me with your gold?”

“I mean to say, we should have enough to start on, and... of course I've
made an infernal hash of everything I've tried up till now, but there must
be something I can do, and you can jolly well bet I'd have a goodish stab
at it. I mean to say, with you to buck me up and so forth, don't you know.
Well, I mean...”

“Has it struck you that I may already be engaged to someone else?”

“Oh, golly! Are you?”

For the first time he turned and faced her, and there was a look in his
eyes which touched Sally and drove all sense of the ludicrous out of her.
Absurd as it was, this man was really serious.

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact I am,” she said soberly.

Ginger Kemp bit his lip and for a moment was silent.

“Oh, well, that's torn it!” he said at last.

Sally was aware of an emotion too complex to analyse. There was pity in
it, but amusement too. The emotion, though she did not recognize it, was
maternal. Mothers, listening to their children pleading with engaging
absurdity for something wholly out of their power to bestow, feel that
same wavering between tears and laughter. Sally wanted to pick Ginger up
and kiss him. The one thing she could not do was to look on him, sorry as
she was for him, as a reasonable, grown-up man.

“You don't really mean it, you know.”

“Don't I!” said Ginger, hollowly. “Oh, don't I!”

“You can't! There isn't such a thing in real life as love at first sight.
Love's a thing that comes when you know a person well and...” She paused.
It had just occurred to her that she was hardly the girl to lecture in
this strain. Her love for Gerald Foster had been sufficiently sudden, even
instantaneous. What did she know of Gerald except that she loved him? They
had become engaged within two weeks of their first meeting. She found this
recollection damping to her eloquence, and ended by saying tamely:

“It's ridiculous.”

Ginger had simmered down to a mood of melancholy resignation.

“I couldn't have expected you to care for me, I suppose, anyway,” he said,
sombrely. “I'm not much of a chap.”

It was just the diversion from the theme under discussion which Sally had
been longing to find. She welcomed the chance of continuing the
conversation on a less intimate and sentimental note.

“That's exactly what I wanted to talk to you about,” she said, seizing the
opportunity offered by this display of humility. “I've been looking for
you all day to go on with what I was starting to say in the lift last
night when we were interrupted. Do you mind if I talk to you like an aunt—or
a sister, suppose we say? Really, the best plan would be for you to adopt
me as an honorary sister. What do you think?”

Ginger did not appear noticeably elated at the suggested relationship.

“Because I really do take a tremendous interest in you.”

Ginger brightened. “That's awfully good of you.”

“I'm going to speak words of wisdom. Ginger, why don't you brace up?”

“Brace up?”

“Yes, stiffen your backbone and stick out your chin, and square your
elbows, and really amount to something. Why do you simply flop about and
do nothing and leave everything to what you call 'the family'? Why do you
have to be helped all the time? Why don't you help yourself? Why do you
have to have jobs found for you? Why don't you rush out and get one? Why
do you have to worry about what, 'the family' thinks of you? Why don't you
make yourself independent of them? I know you had hard luck, suddenly
finding yourself without money and all that, but, good heavens, everybody
else in the world who has ever done anything has been broke at one time or
another. It's part of the fun. You'll never get anywhere by letting
yourself be picked up by the family like... like a floppy Newfoundland
puppy and dumped down in any old place that happens to suit them. A job's
a thing you've got to choose for yourself and get for yourself. Think what
you can do—there must be something—and then go at it with a
snort and grab it and hold it down and teach it to take a joke. You've
managed to collect some money. It will give you time to look round. And,
when you've had a look round, do something! Try to realize you're alive,
and try to imagine the family isn't!”

Sally stopped and drew a deep breath. Ginger Kemp did not reply for a
moment. He seemed greatly impressed.

“When you talk quick,” he said at length, in a serious meditative voice,
“your nose sort of goes all squiggly. Ripping, it looks!”

Sally uttered an indignant cry.

“Do you mean to say you haven't been listening to a word I've been
saying,” she demanded.

“Oh, rather! Oh, by Jove, yes.”

“Well, what did I say?”

“You... er... And your eyes sort of shine, too.”

“Never mind my eyes. What did I say?”

“You told me,” said Ginger, on reflection, “to get a job.”

“Well, yes. I put it much better than that, but that's what it amounted
to, I suppose. All right, then. I'm glad you...”

Ginger was eyeing her with mournful devotion. “I say,” he interrupted, “I
wish you'd let me write to you. Letters, I mean, and all that. I have an
idea it would kind of buck me up.”

“You won't have time for writing letters.”

“I'll have time to write them to you. You haven't an address or anything
of that sort in America, have you, by any chance? I mean, so that I'd know
where to write to.”

“I can give you an address which will always find me.” She told him the
number and street of Mrs. Meecher's boarding-house, and he wrote them down
reverently on his shirt-cuff. “Yes, on second thoughts, do write,” she
said. “Of course, I shall want to know how you've got on. I... oh, my
goodness! That clock's not right?”

“Just about. What time does your train go?”

“Go! It's gone! Or, at least, it goes in about two seconds.” She made a
rush for the swing-door, to the confusion of the uniformed official who
had not been expecting this sudden activity. “Good-bye, Ginger. Write to
me, and remember what I said.”

Ginger, alert after his unexpected fashion when it became a question of
physical action, had followed her through the swing-door, and they emerged
together and started running down the square.

“Stick it!” said Ginger, encouragingly. He was running easily and well, as
becomes a man who, in his day, had been a snip for his international at
scrum-half.

Sally saved her breath. The train was beginning to move slowly out of the
station as they sprinted abreast on to the platform. Ginger dived for the
nearest door, wrenched it open, gathered Sally neatly in his arms, and
flung her in. She landed squarely on the toes of a man who occupied the
corner seat, and, bounding off again, made for the window. Ginger,
faithful to the last, was trotting beside the train as it gathered speed.

“Ginger! My poor porter! Tip him. I forgot.”

“Right ho!”

“And don't forget what I've been saying.”

“Right ho!”

“Look after yourself and 'Death to the Family!'”

“Right ho!”

The train passed smoothly out of the station. Sally cast one last look
back at her red-haired friend, who had now halted and was waving a
handkerchief. Then she turned to apologize to the other occupant of the
carriage.

“I'm so sorry,” she said, breathlessly. “I hope I didn't hurt you.”

She found herself facing Ginger's cousin, the dark man of yesterday's
episode on the beach, Bruce Carmyle.

3

Mr. Carmyle was not a man who readily allowed himself to be disturbed by
life's little surprises, but at the present moment he could not help
feeling slightly dazed. He recognized Sally now as the French girl who had
attracted his cousin Lancelot's notice on the beach. At least he had
assumed that she was French, and it was startling to be addressed by her
now in fluent English. How had she suddenly acquired this gift of tongues?
And how on earth had she had time since yesterday, when he had been a
total stranger to her, to become sufficiently intimate with Cousin
Lancelot to be sprinting with him down station platforms and addressing
him out of railway-carriage windows as Ginger? Bruce Carmyle was aware
that most members of that sub-species of humanity, his cousin's personal
friends, called him by that familiar—and, so Carmyle held, vulgar—nickname:
but how had this girl got hold of it?

If Sally had been less pretty, Mr. Carmyle would undoubtedly have looked
disapprovingly at her, for she had given his rather rigid sense of the
proprieties a nasty jar. But as, panting and flushed from her run, she was
prettier than any girl he had yet met, he contrived to smile.

“Not at all,” he said in answer to her question, though it was far from
the truth. His left big toe was aching confoundedly. Even a girl with a
foot as small as Sally's can make her presence felt on a man's toe if the
scrum-half who is handling her aims well and uses plenty of vigour.

“If you don't mind,” said Sally, sitting down, “I think I'll breathe a
little.”

She breathed. The train sped on.

“Quite a close thing,” said Bruce Carmyle, affably. The pain in his toe
was diminishing. “You nearly missed it.”

“Yes. It was lucky Mr. Kemp was with me. He throws very straight, doesn't
he.”

“Tell me,” said Carmyle, “how do you come to know my Cousin? On the beach
yesterday morning...”

“Oh, we didn't know each other then. But we were staying at the same
hotel, and we spent an hour or so shut up in an elevator together. That
was when we really got acquainted.”

A waiter entered the compartment, announcing in unexpected English that
dinner was served in the restaurant car. “Would you care for dinner?”

“I'm starving,” said Sally.

She reproved herself, as they made their way down the corridor, for being
so foolish as to judge anyone by his appearance. This man was perfectly
pleasant in spite of his grim exterior. She had decided by the time they
had seated themselves at the table she liked him.

At the table, however, Mr. Carmyle's manner changed for the worse. He lost
his amiability. He was evidently a man who took his meals seriously and
believed in treating waiters with severity. He shuddered austerely at a
stain on the table-cloth, and then concentrated himself frowningly on the
bill of fare. Sally, meanwhile, was establishing cosy relations with the
much too friendly waiter, a cheerful old man who from the start seemed to
have made up his mind to regard her as a favourite daughter. The waiter
talked no English and Sally no French, but they were getting along
capitally, when Mr. Carmyle, who had been irritably waving aside the
servitor's light-hearted advice—at the Hotel Splendide the waiters
never bent over you and breathed cordial suggestions down the side of your
face—gave his order crisply in the Anglo-Gallic dialect of the
travelling Briton. The waiter remarked, “Boum!” in a pleased sort of way,
and vanished.

“Nice old man!” said Sally.

“Infernally familiar!” said Mr. Carmyle.

Sally perceived that on the topic of the waiter she and her host did not
see eye to eye and that little pleasure or profit could be derived from
any discussion centring about him. She changed the subject. She was not
liking Mr. Carmyle quite so much as she had done a few minutes ago, but it
was courteous of him to give her dinner, and she tried to like him as much
as she could.

“By the way,” she said, “my name is Nicholas. I always think it's a good
thing to start with names, don't you?”

“Mine...”

“Oh, I know yours. Ginger—Mr. Kemp told me.”

Mr. Carmyle, who since the waiter's departure, had been thawing, stiffened
again at the mention of Ginger.

“Indeed?” he said, coldly. “Apparently you got intimate.”

Sally did not like his tone. He seemed to be criticizing her, and she
resented criticism from a stranger. Her eyes opened wide and she looked
dangerously across the table.

“Why 'apparently'? I told you that we had got intimate, and I explained
how. You can't stay shut up in an elevator half the night with anybody
without getting to know him. I found Mr. Kemp very pleasant.”

“Really?”

“And very interesting.”

Mr. Carmyle raised his eyebrows.

“Would you call him interesting?”

“I did call him interesting.” Sally was beginning to feel the exhilaration
of battle. Men usually made themselves extremely agreeable to her, and she
reacted belligerently under the stiff unfriendliness which had come over
her companion in the last few minutes.

“He told me all about himself.”

“And you found that interesting?”

“Why not?”

“Well...” A frigid half-smile came and went on Bruce Carmyle's dark face.
“My cousin has many excellent qualities, no doubt—he used to play
football well, and I understand that he is a capable amateur pugilist—but
I should not have supposed him entertaining. We find him a little dull.”

“I thought it was only royalty that called themselves 'we.'”

“I meant myself—and the rest of the family.”

The mention of the family was too much for Sally. She had to stop talking
in order to allow her mind to clear itself of rude thoughts.

“Mr. Kemp was telling me about Mr. Scrymgeour,” she went on at length.

Bruce Carmyle stared for a moment at the yard or so of French bread which
the waiter had placed on the table.

“Indeed?” he said. “He has an engaging lack of reticence.”

The waiter returned bearing soup and dumped it down.

“V'la!” he observed, with the satisfied air of a man who has successfully
performed a difficult conjuring trick. He smiled at Sally expectantly, as
though confident of applause from this section of his audience at least.
But Sally's face was set and rigid. She had been snubbed, and the
sensation was as pleasant as it was novel.

“I think Mr. Kemp had hard luck,” she said.

“If you will excuse me, I would prefer not to discuss the matter.”

Mr. Carmyle's attitude was that Sally might be a pretty girl, but she was
a stranger, and the intimate affairs of the Family were not to be
discussed with strangers, however prepossessing.

“He was quite in the right. Mr. Scrymgeour was beating a dog...”

“I've heard the details.”

“Oh, I didn't know that. Well, don't you agree with me, then?”

“I do not. A man who would throw away an excellent position simply
because...”

“Oh, well, if that's your view, I suppose it is useless to talk about it.”

“Quite.”

“Still, there's no harm in asking what you propose to do about Gin—about
Mr. Kemp.”

Mr. Carmyle became more glacial.

“I'm afraid I cannot discuss...”

Sally's quick impatience, nobly restrained till now, finally got the
better of her.

“Oh, for goodness' sake,” she snapped, “do try to be human, and don't
always be snubbing people. You remind me of one of those portraits of men
in the eighteenth century, with wooden faces, who look out of heavy gold
frames at you with fishy eyes as if you were a regrettable incident.”

“Rosbif,” said the waiter genially, manifesting himself suddenly beside
them as if he had popped up out of a trap.

Bruce Carmyle attacked his roast beef morosely. Sally who was in the mood
when she knew that she would be ashamed of herself later on, but was full
of battle at the moment, sat in silence.

“I am sorry,” said Mr. Carmyle ponderously, “if my eyes are fishy. The
fact has not been called to my attention before.”

“I suppose you never had any sisters,” said Sally. “They would have told
you.”

Mr. Carmyle relapsed into an offended dumbness, which lasted till the
waiter had brought the coffee.

“I think,” said Sally, getting up, “I'll be going now. I don't seem to
want any coffee, and, if I stay on, I may say something rude. I thought I
might be able to put in a good word for Mr. Kemp and save him from being
massacred, but apparently it's no use. Good-bye, Mr. Carmyle, and thank
you for giving me dinner.”

She made her way down the car, followed by Bruce Carmyle's indignant, yet
fascinated, gaze. Strange emotions were stirring in Mr. Carmyle's bosom.

CHAPTER IV. GINGER IN DANGEROUS MOOD

Some few days later, owing to the fact that the latter, being preoccupied,
did not see him first, Bruce Carmyle met his cousin Lancelot in
Piccadilly. They had returned by different routes from Roville, and Ginger
would have preferred the separation to continue. He was hurrying on with a
nod, when Carmyle stopped him.

“Just the man I wanted to see,” he observed.

“Oh, hullo!” said Ginger, without joy.

“I was thinking of calling at your club.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. Cigarette?”

Ginger peered at the proffered case with the vague suspicion of the man
who has allowed himself to be lured on to the platform and is accepting a
card from the conjurer. He felt bewildered. In all the years of their
acquaintance he could not recall another such exhibition of geniality on
his cousin's part. He was surprised, indeed, at Mr. Carmyle's speaking to
him at all, for the affaire Scrymgeour remained an un-healed wound, and
the Family, Ginger knew, were even now in session upon it.

“Been back in London long?”

“Day or two.”

“I heard quite by accident that you had returned and that you were staying
at the club. By the way, thank you for introducing me to Miss Nicholas.”

Ginger started violently.

“What!”

“I was in that compartment, you know, at Roville Station. You threw her
right on top of me. We agreed to consider that an introduction. An
attractive girl.”

Bruce Carmyle had not entirely made up his mind regarding Sally, but on
one point he was clear, that she should not, if he could help it, pass out
of his life. Her abrupt departure had left him with that baffled and
dissatisfied feeling which, though it has little in common with love at
first sight, frequently produces the same effects. She had had, he could
not disguise it from himself, the better of their late encounter and he
was conscious of a desire to meet her again and show her that there was
more in him than she apparently supposed. Bruce Carmyle, in a word, was
piqued: and, though he could not quite decide whether he liked or disliked
Sally, he was very sure that a future without her would have an element of
flatness.

“A very attractive girl. We had a very pleasant talk.”

“I bet you did,” said Ginger enviously.

“By the way, she did not give you her address by any chance?”

“Why?” said Ginger suspiciously. His attitude towards Sally's address
resembled somewhat that of a connoisseur who has acquired a unique work of
art. He wanted to keep it to himself and gloat over it.

“Well, I—er—I promised to send her some books she was anxious
to read...”

“I shouldn't think she gets much time for reading.”

“Books which are not published in America.”

“Oh, pretty nearly everything is published in America, what? Bound to be,
I mean.”

“Well, these particular books are not,” said Mr. Carmyle shortly. He was
finding Ginger's reserve a little trying, and wished that he had been more
inventive.

“Give them to me and I'll send them to her,” suggested Ginger.

“Good Lord, man!” snapped Mr. Carmyle. “I'm capable of sending a few books
to America. Where does she live?”

Ginger revealed the sacred number of the holy street which had the luck to
be Sally's headquarters. He did it because with a persistent devil like
his cousin there seemed no way of getting out of it: but he did it
grudgingly.

“Thanks.” Bruce Carmyle wrote the information down with a gold pencil in a
dapper little morocco-bound note-book. He was the sort of man who always
has a pencil, and the backs of old envelopes never enter into his life.

There was a pause. Bruce Carmyle coughed.

“I saw Uncle Donald this morning,” he said.

His manner had lost its geniality. There was no need for it now, and he
was a man who objected to waste. He spoke coldly, and in his voice there
was a familiar sub-tingle of reproof.

“Yes?” said Ginger moodily. This was the uncle in whose office he had made
his debut as a hasher: a worthy man, highly respected in the National
Liberal Club, but never a favourite of Ginger's. There were other minor
uncles and a few subsidiary aunts who went to make up the Family, but
Uncle Donald was unquestionably the managing director of that body and it
was Ginger's considered opinion that in this capacity he approximated to a
human blister.

“He wants you to dine with him to-night at Bleke's.”

Ginger's depression deepened. A dinner with Uncle Donald would hardly have
been a cheerful function, even in the surroundings of a banquet in the
Arabian Nights. There was that about Uncle Donald's personality which
would have cast a sobering influence over the orgies of the Emperor
Tiberius at Capri. To dine with him at a morgue like that relic of Old
London, Bleke's Coffee House, which confined its custom principally to
regular patrons who had not missed an evening there for half a century,
was to touch something very near bed-rock. Ginger was extremely doubtful
whether flesh and blood were equal to it.

“To-night?” he said. “Oh, you mean to-night? Well...”

“Don't be a fool. You know as well as I do that you've got to go.” Uncle
Donald's invitations were royal commands in the Family. “If you've another
engagement you must put it off.”

“Oh, all right.”

“Seven-thirty sharp.”

“All right,” said Ginger gloomily.

The two men went their ways, Bruce Carmyle eastwards because he had
clients to see in his chambers at the Temple; Ginger westwards because Mr.
Carmyle had gone east. There was little sympathy between these cousins:
yet, oddly enough, their thoughts as they walked centred on the same
object. Bruce Carmyle, threading his way briskly through the crowds of
Piccadilly Circus, was thinking of Sally: and so was Ginger as he loafed
aimlessly towards Hyde Park Corner, bumping in a sort of coma from
pedestrian to pedestrian.

Since his return to London Ginger had been in bad shape. He mooned through
the days and slept poorly at night. If there is one thing rottener than
another in a pretty blighted world, one thing which gives a fellow the pip
and reduces him to the condition of an absolute onion, it is hopeless
love. Hopeless love had got Ginger all stirred up. His had been hitherto a
placid soul. Even the financial crash which had so altered his life had
not bruised him very deeply. His temperament had enabled him to bear the
slings and arrows of outrageous fortune with a philosophic “Right ho!” But
now everything seemed different. Things irritated him acutely, which
before he had accepted as inevitable—his Uncle Donald's moustache,
for instance, and its owner's habit of employing it during meals as a sort
of zareba or earthwork against the assaults of soup.

“By gad!” thought Ginger, stopping suddenly opposite Devonshire House. “If
he uses that damned shrubbery as soup-strainer to-night, I'll slosh him
with a fork!”

Hard thoughts... hard thoughts! And getting harder all the time, for
nothing grows more quickly than a mood of rebellion. Rebellion is a forest
fire that flames across the soul. The spark had been lighted in Ginger,
and long before he reached Hyde Park Corner he was ablaze and crackling.
By the time he returned to his club he was practically a menace to society—to
that section of it, at any rate, which embraced his Uncle Donald, his
minor uncles George and William, and his aunts Mary, Geraldine, and
Louise.

Nor had the mood passed when he began to dress for the dismal festivities
of Bleke's Coffee House. He scowled as he struggled morosely with an
obstinate tie. One cannot disguise the fact—Ginger was warming up.
And it was just at this moment that Fate, as though it had been waiting
for the psychological instant, applied the finishing touch. There was a
knock at the door, and a waiter came in with a telegram.

Ginger looked at the envelope. It had been readdressed and forwarded on
from the Hotel Normandie. It was a wireless, handed in on board the White
Star liner Olympic, and it ran as follows:

Remember. Death to the Family. S.

Ginger sat down heavily on the bed.

The driver of the taxi-cab which at twenty-five minutes past seven drew up
at the dingy door of Bleke's Coffee House in the Strand was rather struck
by his fare's manner and appearance. A determined-looking sort of young
bloke, was the taxi-driver's verdict.

CHAPTER V. SALLY HEARS NEWS

It had been Sally's intention, on arriving in New York, to take a room at
the St. Regis and revel in the gilded luxury to which her wealth entitled
her before moving into the small but comfortable apartment which, as soon
as she had the time, she intended to find and make her permanent abode.
But when the moment came and she was giving directions to the taxi-driver
at the dock, there seemed to her something revoltingly Fillmorian about
the scheme. It would be time enough to sever herself from the
boarding-house which had been her home for three years when she had found
the apartment. Meanwhile, the decent thing to do, if she did not want to
brand herself in the sight of her conscience as a female Fillmore, was to
go back temporarily to Mrs. Meecher's admirable establishment and
foregather with her old friends. After all, home is where the heart is,
even if there are more prunes there than the gourmet would consider
judicious.

Perhaps it was the unavoidable complacency induced by the thought that she
was doing the right thing, or possibly it was the tingling expectation of
meeting Gerald Foster again after all these weeks of separation, that made
the familiar streets seem wonderfully bright as she drove through them. It
was a perfect, crisp New York morning, all blue sky and amber sunshine,
and even the ash-cans had a stimulating look about them. The street cars
were full of happy people rollicking off to work: policemen directed the
traffic with jaunty affability: and the white-clad street-cleaners went
about their poetic tasks with a quiet but none the less noticeable relish.
It was improbable that any of these people knew that she was back, but
somehow they all seemed to be behaving as though this were a special day.

The first discordant note in this overture of happiness was struck by Mrs.
Meecher, who informed Sally, after expressing her gratification at the
news that she required her old room, that Gerald Foster had left town that
morning.

“Gone to Detroit, he has,” said Mrs. Meecher. “Miss Doland, too.” She
broke off to speak a caustic word to the boarding-house handyman, who,
with Sally's trunk as a weapon, was depreciating the value of the
wall-paper in the hall. “There's that play of his being tried out there,
you know, Monday,” resumed Mrs. Meecher, after the handyman had bumped his
way up the staircase. “They been rehearsing ever since you left.”

Sally was disappointed, but it was such a beautiful morning, and New York
was so wonderful after the dull voyage in the liner that she was not going
to allow herself to be depressed without good reason. After all, she could
go on to Detroit tomorrow. It was nice to have something to which she
could look forward.

“Oh, is Elsa in the company?” she said.

“Sure. And very good too, I hear.” Mrs. Meecher kept abreast of theatrical
gossip. She was an ex-member of the profession herself, having been in the
first production of “Florodora,” though, unlike everybody else, not one of
the original Sextette. “Mr. Faucitt was down to see a rehearsal, and he
said Miss Doland was fine. And he's not easy to please, as you know.”

“How is Mr. Faucitt?”

Mrs. Meecher, not unwillingly, for she was a woman who enjoyed the
tragedies of life, made her second essay in the direction of lowering
Sally's uplifted mood.

“Poor old gentleman, he ain't over and above well. Went to bed early last
night with a headache, and this morning I been to see him and he don't
look well. There's a lot of this Spanish influenza about. It might be
that. Lots o' people have been dying of it, if you believe what you see in
the papers,” said Mrs. Meecher buoyantly.

“Good gracious! You don't think...?”

“Well, he ain't turned black,” admitted Mrs. Meecher with regret. “They
say they turn black. If you believe what you see in the papers, that is.
Of course, that may come later,” she added with the air of one confident
that all will come right in the future. “The doctor'll be in to see him
pretty soon. He's quite happy. Toto's sitting with him.”

Sally's concern increased. Like everyone who had ever spent any length of
time in the house, she had strong views on Toto. This quadruped, who
stained the fame of the entire canine race by posing as a dog, was a small
woolly animal with a persistent and penetrating yap, hard to bear with
equanimity in health and certainly quite outside the range of a sick man.
Her heart bled for Mr. Faucitt. Mrs. Meecher, on the other hand, who held
a faith in her little pet's amiability and power to soothe which seven
years' close association had been unable to shake, seemed to feel that,
with Toto on the spot, all that could be done had been done as far as
pampering the invalid was concerned.

“I must go up and see him,” cried Sally. “Poor old dear.”

“Sure. You know his room. You can hear Toto talking to him now,” said Mrs.
Meecher complacently. “He wants a cracker, that's what he wants. Toto
likes a cracker after breakfast.”

The invalid's eyes, as Sally entered the room, turned wearily to the door.
At the sight of Sally they lit up with an incredulous rapture. Almost any
intervention would have pleased Mr. Faucitt at that moment, for his little
playmate had long outstayed any welcome that might originally have been
his: but that the caller should be his beloved Sally seemed to the old man
something in the nature of a return of the age of miracles.

“Sally!”

“One moment. Here, Toto!”

Toto, struck momentarily dumb by the sight of food, had jumped off the bed
and was standing with his head on one side, peering questioningly at the
cracker. He was a suspicious dog, but he allowed himself to be lured into
the passage, upon which Sally threw the cracker down and slipped in and
shut the door. Toto, after a couple of yaps, which may have been gratitude
or baffled fury, trotted off downstairs, and Mr. Faucitt drew a deep
breath.

“Sally, you come, as ever, as an angel of mercy. Our worthy Mrs. Meecher
means well, and I yield to no man in my respect for her innate kindness of
heart: but she errs in supposing that that thrice-damned whelp of hers is
a combination of sick-nurse, soothing medicine, and a week at the seaside.
She insisted on bringing him here. He was yapping then, as he was yapping
when, with womanly resource which I cannot sufficiently praise, you
decoyed him hence. And each yap went through me like hammer-strokes on
sheeted tin. Sally, you stand alone among womankind. You shine like a good
deed in a naughty world. When did you get back?”

“I've only just arrived in my hired barouche from the pier.”

“And you came to see your old friend without delay? I am grateful and
flattered. Sally, my dear.”

“Of course I came to see you. Do you suppose that, when Mrs. Meecher told
me you were sick, I just said 'Is that so?' and went on talking about the
weather? Well, what do you mean by it? Frightening everybody. Poor old
darling, do you feel very bad?”

“One thousand individual mice are nibbling the base of my spine, and I am
conscious of a constant need of cooling refreshment. But what of that?
Your presence is a tonic. Tell me, how did our Sally enjoy foreign
travel?”

“Our Sally had the time of her life.”

“Did you visit England?”

“Only passing through.”

“How did it look?” asked Mr. Faucitt eagerly.

“Moist. Very moist.”

“It would,” said Mr. Faucitt indulgently. “I confess that, happy as I have
been in this country, there are times when I miss those wonderful London
days, when a sort of cosy brown mist hangs over the streets and the
pavements ooze with a perspiration of mud and water, and you see through
the haze the yellow glow of the Bodega lamps shining in the distance like
harbour-lights. Not,” said Mr. Faucitt, “that I specify the Bodega to the
exclusion of other and equally worthy hostelries. I have passed just as
pleasant hours in Rule's and Short's. You missed something by not
lingering in England, Sally.”

“I know I did—pneumonia.”

Mr. Faucitt shook his head reproachfully.

“You are prejudiced, my dear. You would have enjoyed London if you had had
the courage to brave its superficial gloom. Where did you spend your
holiday? Paris?”

“Part of the time. And the rest of the while I was down by the sea. It was
glorious. I don't think I would ever have come back if I hadn't had to.
But, of course, I wanted to see you all again. And I wanted to be at the
opening of Mr. Foster's play. Mrs. Meecher tells me you went to one of the
rehearsals.”

“I attended a dog-fight which I was informed was a rehearsal,” said Mr.
Faucitt severely. “There is no rehearsing nowadays.”

“Oh dear! Was it as bad as all that?”

“The play is good. The play—I will go further—is excellent. It
has fat. But the acting...”

“Mrs. Meecher said you told her that Elsa was good.”

“Our worthy hostess did not misreport me. Miss Doland has great
possibilities. She reminds me somewhat of Matilda Devine, under whose
banner I played a season at the Old Royalty in London many years ago. She
has the seeds of greatness in her, but she is wasted in the present case
on an insignificant part. There is only one part in the play. I allude to
the one murdered by Miss Mabel Hobson.”

“Murdered!” Sally's heart sank. She had been afraid of this, and it was no
satisfaction to feel that she had warned Gerald. “Is she very terrible?”

“She has the face of an angel and the histrionic ability of that curious
suet pudding which our estimable Mrs. Meecher is apt to give us on
Fridays. In my professional career I have seen many cases of what I may
term the Lady Friend in the role of star, but Miss Hobson eclipses them
all. I remember in the year '94 a certain scion of the plutocracy took it
into his head to present a female for whom he had conceived an admiration
in a part which would have taxed the resources of the ablest. I was
engaged in her support, and at the first rehearsal I recollect saying to
my dear old friend, Arthur Moseby—dead, alas, these many years. An
excellent juvenile, but, like so many good fellows, cursed with a tendency
to lift the elbow—I recollect saying to him 'Arthur, dear boy, I
give it two weeks.' 'Max,' was his reply, 'you are an incurable optimist.
One consecutive night, laddie, one consecutive night.' We had, I recall,
an even half-crown upon it. He won. We opened at Wigan, our leading lady
got the bird, and the show closed next day. I was forcibly reminded of
this incident as I watched Miss Hobson rehearsing.”

“Oh, poor Ger—poor Mr. Foster!”

“I do not share your commiseration for that young man,” said Mr. Faucitt
austerely. “You probably are almost a stranger to him, but he and I have
been thrown together a good deal of late. A young man upon whom, mark my
words, success, if it ever comes, will have the worst effects. I dislike
him. Sally. He is, I think, without exception, the most selfish and
self-centred young man of my acquaintance. He reminds me very much of old
Billy Fothergill, with whom I toured a good deal in the later eighties.
Did I ever tell you the story of Billy and the amateur who...?”

Sally was in no mood to listen to the adventures of Mr. Fothergill. The
old man's innocent criticism of Gerald had stabbed her deeply. A momentary
impulse to speak hotly in his defence died away as she saw Mr. Faucitt's
pale, worn old face. He had meant no harm, after all. How could he know
what Gerald was to her?

She changed the conversation abruptly.

“Have you seen anything of Fillmore while I've been away?”

“Fillmore? Why yes, my dear, curiously enough I happened to run into him
on Broadway only a few days ago. He seemed changed—less stiff and
aloof than he had been for some time past. I may be wronging him, but
there have been times of late when one might almost have fancied him a
trifle up-stage. All that was gone at our last encounter. He appeared glad
to see me and was most cordial.”

Sally found her composure restored. Her lecture on the night of the party
had evidently, she thought, not been wasted. Mr. Faucitt, however,
advanced another theory to account for the change in the Man of Destiny.

“I rather fancy,” he said, “that the softening influence has been the
young man's fiancée.”

“What? Fillmore's not engaged?”

“Did he not write and tell you? I suppose he was waiting to inform you
when you returned. Yes, Fillmore is betrothed. The lady was with him when
we met. A Miss Winch. In the profession, I understand. He introduced me. A
very charming and sensible young lady, I thought.”

Sally shook her head.

“She can't be. Fillmore would never have got engaged to anyone like that.
Was her hair crimson?”

“Brown, if I recollect rightly.”

“Very loud, I suppose, and overdressed?”

“On the contrary, neat and quiet.”

“You've made a mistake,” said Sally decidedly. “She can't have been like
that. I shall have to look into this. It does seem hard that I can't go
away for a few weeks without all my friends taking to beds of sickness and
all my brothers getting ensnared by vampires.”

A knock at the door interrupted her complaint. Mrs. Meecher entered,
ushering in a pleasant little man with spectacles and black bag.

“The doctor to see you, Mr. Faucitt.” Mrs. Meecher cast an appraising eye
at the invalid, as if to detect symptoms of approaching discoloration.
“I've been telling him that what I think you've gotten is this here new
Spanish influenza. Two more deaths there were in the paper this morning,
if you can believe what you see...”

“I wonder,” said the doctor, “if you would mind going and bringing me a
small glass of water?”

“Why, sure.”

“Not a large glass—a small glass. Just let the tap run for a few
moments and take care not to spill any as you come up the stairs. I always
ask ladies, like our friend who has just gone,” he added as the door
closed, “to bring me a glass of water. It keeps them amused and interested
and gets them out of the way, and they think I am going to do a conjuring
trick with it. As a matter of fact, I'm going to drink it. Now let's have
a look at you.”

The examination did not take long. At the end of it the doctor seemed
somewhat chagrined.

“Our good friend's diagnosis was correct. I'd give a leg to say it wasn't,
but it was. It is this here new Spanish influenza. Not a bad attack. You
want to stay in bed and keep warm, and I'll write you out a prescription.
You ought to be nursed. Is this young lady a nurse?”

“No, no, merely...”

“Of course I'm a nurse,” said Sally decidedly. “It isn't difficult, is it,
doctor? I know nurses smooth pillows. I can do that. Is there anything
else?”

“Their principal duty is to sit here and prevent the excellent and
garrulous lady who has just left us from getting in. They must also be
able to aim straight with a book or an old shoe, if that small woolly dog
I met downstairs tries to force an entrance. If you are equal to these
tasks, I can leave the case in your hands with every confidence.”

“But, Sally, my dear,” said Mr. Faucitt, concerned, “you must not waste
your time looking after me. You have a thousand things to occupy you.”

“There's nothing I want to do more than help you to get better. I'll just
go out and send a wire, and then I'll be right back.”

Five minutes later, Sally was in a Western Union office, telegraphing to
Gerald that she would be unable to reach Detroit in time for the opening.

CHAPTER VI. FIRST AID FOR FILLMORE

1

It was not till the following Friday that Sally was able to start for
Detroit. She arrived on the Saturday morning and drove to the Hotel
Statler. Having ascertained that Gerald was stopping in the hotel and
having 'phoned up to his room to tell him to join her, she went into the
dining-room and ordered breakfast.

She felt low-spirited as she waited for the food to arrive. The nursing of
Mr. Faucitt had left her tired, and she had not slept well on the train.
But the real cause of her depression was the fact that there had been a
lack of enthusiasm in Gerald's greeting over the telephone just now. He
had spoken listlessly, as though the fact of her returning after all these
weeks was a matter of no account, and she felt hurt and perplexed.

A cup of coffee had a stimulating effect. Men, of course, were always like
this in the early morning. It would, no doubt, be a very different Gerald
who would presently bound into the dining-room, quickened and restored by
a cold shower-bath. In the meantime, here was food, and she needed it.

She was pouring out her second cup of coffee when a stout young man, of
whom she had caught a glimpse as he moved about that section of the hotel
lobby which was visible through the open door of the dining-room, came in
and stood peering about as though in search of someone. The momentary
sight she had had of this young man had interested Sally. She had thought
how extraordinarily like he was to her brother Fillmore. Now she perceived
that it was Fillmore himself.

Sally was puzzled. What could Fillmore be doing so far west? She had
supposed him to be a permanent resident of New York. But, of course, your
man of affairs and vast interests flits about all over the place. At any
rate, here he was, and she called him. And, after he had stood in the
doorway looking in every direction except the right one for another
minute, he saw her and came over to her table.

“Why, Sally?” His manner, she thought, was nervous—one might almost
have said embarrassed. She attributed this to a guilty conscience.
Presently he would have to break to her the news that he had become
engaged to be married without her sisterly sanction, and no doubt he was
wondering how to begin. “What are you doing here? I thought you were in
Europe.”

“I got back a week ago, but I've been nursing poor old Mr. Faucitt ever
since then. He's been ill, poor old dear. I've come here to see Mr.
Foster's play, 'The Primrose Way,' you know. Is it a success?”

“It hasn't opened yet.”

“Don't be silly, Fill. Do pull yourself together. It opened last Monday.”

“No, it didn't. Haven't you heard? They've closed all the theatres because
of this infernal Spanish influenza. Nothing has been playing this week.
You must have seen it in the papers.”

“I haven't had time to read the papers. Oh, Fill, what an awful shame!”

“Yes, it's pretty tough. Makes the company all on edge. I've had the
darndest time, I can tell you.”

“Why, what have you got to do with it?”

Fillmore coughed.

“I—er—oh, I didn't tell you that. I'm sort of—er—mixed
up in the show. Cracknell—you remember he was at college with me—suggested
that I should come down and look at it. Shouldn't wonder if he wants me to
put money into it and so on.”

“I thought he had all the money in the world.”

“Yes, he has a lot, but these fellows like to let a pal in on a good
thing.”

“Is it a good thing?”

“The play's fine.”

“That's what Mr. Faucitt said. But Mabel Hobson...”

Fillmore's ample face registered emotion.

“She's an awful woman, Sally! She can't act, and she throws her weight
about all the time. The other day there was a fuss about a paper-knife...”

“How do you mean, a fuss about a paper-knife?”

“One of the props, you know. It got mislaid. I'm certain it wasn't my
fault...”

“How could it have been your fault?” asked Sally wonderingly. Love seemed
to have the worst effects on Fillmore's mentality.

“Well—er—you know how it is. Angry woman... blames the first
person she sees... This paper-knife...”

Fillmore's voice trailed off into pained silence.

“Mr. Faucitt said Elsa Doland was good.”

“Oh, she's all right,” said Fillmore indifferently. “But—” His face
brightened and animation crept into his voice. “But the girl you want to
watch is Miss Winch. Gladys Winch. She plays the maid. She's only in the
first act, and hasn't much to say, except 'Did you ring, madam?' and
things like that. But it's the way she says 'em! Sally, that girl's a
genius! The greatest character actress in a dozen years! You mark my
words, in a darned little while you'll see her name up on Broadway in
electric light. Personality? Ask me! Charm? She wrote the words and music!
Looks?...”

“All right! All right! I know all about it, Fill. And will you kindly
inform me how you dared to get engaged without consulting me?”

Fillmore blushed richly.

“Oh, do you know?”

“Yes. Mr. Faucitt told me.”

“Well...”

“Well?”

“Well, I'm only human,” argued Fillmore.

“I call that a very handsome admission. You've got quite modest, Fill.”

He had certainly changed for the better since their last meeting.

It was as if someone had punctured him and let out all the pomposity. If
this was due, as Mr. Faucitt had suggested, to the influence of Miss
Winch, Sally felt that she could not but approve of the romance.

“I'll introduce you sometime,' said Fillmore.

“I want to meet her very much.”

“I'll have to be going now. I've got to see Bunbury. I thought he might be
in here.”

“Who's Bunbury?”

“The producer. I suppose he is breakfasting in his room. I'd better go
up.”

“You are busy, aren't you. Little marvel! It's lucky they've got you to
look after them.”

Fillmore retired and Sally settled down to wait for Gerald, no longer hurt
by his manner over the telephone. Poor Gerald! No wonder he had seemed
upset.

A few minutes later he came in.

“Oh, Jerry darling,” said Sally, as he reached the table, “I'm so sorry.
I've just been hearing about it.”

Gerald sat down. His appearance fulfilled the promise of his voice over
the telephone. A sort of nervous dullness wrapped him about like a
garment.

“It's just my luck,” he said gloomily. “It's the kind of thing that
couldn't happen to anyone but me. Damned fools! Where's the sense in
shutting the theatres, even if there is influenza about? They let people
jam against one another all day in the stores. If that doesn't hurt them
why should it hurt them to go to theatres? Besides, it's all infernal
nonsense about this thing. I don't believe there is such a thing as
Spanish influenza. People get colds in their heads and think they're
dying. It's all a fake scare.”

“I don't think it's that,” said Sally. “Poor Mr. Faucitt had it quite
badly. That's why I couldn't come earlier.”

Gerald did not seem interested either by the news of Mr. Faucitt's illness
or by the fact that Sally, after delay, had at last arrived. He dug a
spoon sombrely into his grape-fruit.

“We've been hanging about here day after day, getting bored to death all
the time... The company's going all to pieces. They're sick of rehearsing
and rehearsing when nobody knows if we'll ever open. They were all keyed
up a week ago, and they've been sagging ever since. It will ruin the play,
of course. My first chance! Just chucked away.”

Sally was listening with a growing feeling of desolation. She tried to be
fair, to remember that he had had a terrible disappointment and was under
a great strain. And yet... it was unfortunate that self-pity was a thing
she particularly disliked in a man. Her vanity, too, was hurt. It was
obvious that her arrival, so far from acting as a magic restorative, had
effected nothing. She could not help remembering, though it made her feel
disloyal, what Mr. Faucitt had said about Gerald. She had never noticed
before that he was remarkably self-centred, but he was thrusting the fact
upon her attention now.

“That Hobson woman is beginning to make trouble,” went on Gerald, prodding
in a despairing sort of way at scrambled eggs. “She ought never to have
had the part, never. She can't handle it. Elsa Doland could play it a
thousand times better. I wrote Elsa in a few lines the other day, and the
Hobson woman went right up in the air. You don't know what a star is till
you've seen one of these promoted clothes-props from the Follies trying to
be one. It took me an hour to talk her round and keep her from throwing up
her part.”

“Why not let her throw up her part?”

“For heaven's sake talk sense,” said Gerald querulously. “Do you suppose
that man Cracknell would keep the play on if she wasn't in it? He would
close the show in a second, and where would I be then? You don't seem to
realize that this is a big chance for me. I'd look a fool throwing it
away.”

“I see,” said Sally, shortly. She had never felt so wretched in her life.
Foreign travel, she decided, was a mistake. It might be pleasant and
broadening to the mind, but it seemed to put you so out of touch with
people when you got back. She analysed her sensations, and arrived at the
conclusion that what she was resenting was the fact that Gerald was trying
to get the advantages of two attitudes simultaneously. A man in trouble
may either be the captain of his soul and superior to pity, or he may be a
broken thing for a woman to pet and comfort. Gerald, it seemed to her, was
advertising himself as an object for her commiseration, and at the same
time raising a barrier against it. He appeared to demand her sympathy
while holding himself aloof from it. She had the uncomfortable sensation
of feeling herself shut out and useless.

“By the way,” said Gerald, “there's one thing. I have to keep her jollying
along all the time, so for goodness' sake don't go letting it out that
we're engaged.”

Sally's chin went up with a jerk. This was too much.

“If you find it a handicap being engaged to me...”

“Don't be silly.” Gerald took refuge in pathos. “Good God! It's tough!
Here am I, worried to death, and you...”

Before he could finish the sentence, Sally's mood had undergone one of
those swift changes which sometimes made her feel that she must be lacking
in character. A simple, comforting thought had come to her, altering her
entire outlook. She had come off the train tired and gritty, and what
seemed the general out-of-jointness of the world was entirely due, she
decided, to the fact that she had not had a bath and that her hair was all
anyhow. She felt suddenly tranquil. If it was merely her grubby and
dishevelled condition that made Gerald seem to her so different, all was
well. She put her hand on his with a quick gesture of penitence.

“I'm so sorry,” she said. “I've been a brute, but I do sympathize,
really.”

“I've had an awful time,” mumbled Gerald.

“I know, I know. But you never told me you were glad to see me.”

“Of course I'm glad to see you.”

“Why didn't you say so, then, you poor fish? And why didn't you ask me if
I had enjoyed myself in Europe?”

“Did you enjoy yourself?”

“Yes, except that I missed you so much. There! Now we can consider my
lecture on foreign travel finished, and you can go on telling me your
troubles.”

Gerald accepted the invitation. He spoke at considerable length, though
with little variety. It appeared definitely established in his mind that
Providence had invented Spanish influenza purely with a view to wrecking
his future. But now he seemed less aloof, more open to sympathy. The brief
thunderstorm had cleared the air. Sally lost that sense of detachment and
exclusion which had weighed upon her.

“Well,” said Gerald, at length, looking at his watch, “I suppose I had
better be off.”

“Rehearsal?”

“Yes, confound it. It's the only way of getting through the day. Are you
coming along?”

“I'll come directly I've unpacked and tidied myself up.”

“See you at the theatre, then.”

Sally went out and rang for the lift to take her up to her room.

2

The rehearsal had started when she reached the theatre. As she entered the
dark auditorium, voices came to her with that thin and reedy effect which
is produced by people talking in an empty building. She sat down at the
back of the house, and, as her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, was able
to see Gerald sitting in the front row beside a man with a bald head
fringed with orange hair whom she took correctly to be Mr. Bunbury, the
producer. Dotted about the house in ones and twos were members of the
company whose presence was not required in the first act. On the stage,
Elsa Doland, looking very attractive, was playing a scene with a man in a
bowler hat. She was speaking a line, as Sally came in.

“Why, what do you mean, father?”

“Tiddly-omty-om,” was the bowler-hatted one's surprising reply.
“Tiddly-omty-om... long speech ending in 'find me in the library.' And
exit,” said the man in the bowler hat, starting to do so.

For the first time Sally became aware of the atmosphere of nerves. Mr.
Bunbury, who seemed to be a man of temperament, picked up his
walking-stick, which was leaning against the next seat, and flung it with
some violence across the house.

“For God's sake!” said Mr. Bunbury.

“Now what?” inquired the bowler hat, interested, pausing hallway across
the stage.

“Do speak the lines, Teddy,” exclaimed Gerald. “Don't skip them in that
sloppy fashion.”

“You don't want me to go over the whole thing?” asked the bowler hat,
amazed.

“Yes!”

“Not the whole damn thing?” queried the bowler hat, fighting with
incredulity.

“This is a rehearsal,” snapped Mr. Bunbury. “If we are not going to do it
properly, what's the use of doing it at all?”

This seemed to strike the erring Teddy, if not as reasonable, at any rate
as one way of looking at it. He delivered the speech in an injured tone
and shuffled off. The atmosphere of tenseness was unmistakable now. Sally
could feel it. The world of the theatre is simply a large nursery and its
inhabitants children who readily become fretful if anything goes wrong.
The waiting and the uncertainty, the loafing about in strange hotels in a
strange city, the dreary rehearsing of lines which had been polished to
the last syllable more than a week ago—these things had sapped the
nerve of the Primrose Way company and demoralization had set in. It would
require only a trifle to produce an explosion.

Elsa Doland now moved to the door, pressed a bell, and, taking a magazine
from the table, sat down in a chair near the footlights. A moment later,
in answer to the ring, a young woman entered, to be greeted instantly by
an impassioned bellow from Mr. Bunbury.

“Miss Winch!”

The new arrival stopped and looked out over the footlights, not in the
pained manner of the man in the bowler hat, but with the sort of genial
indulgence of one who has come to a juvenile party to amuse the children.
She was a square, wholesome, good-humoured looking girl with a serious
face, the gravity of which was contradicted by the faint smile that seemed
to lurk about the corner of her mouth. She was certainly not pretty, and
Sally, watching her with keen interest, was surprised that Fillmore had
had the sense to disregard surface homeliness and recognize her charm.
Deep down in Fillmore, Sally decided, there must lurk an unsuspected vein
of intelligence.

“Hello?” said Miss Winch, amiably.

Mr. Bunbury seemed profoundly moved.

“Miss Winch, did I or did I not ask you to refrain from chewing gum during
rehearsal?”

“That's right, so you did,” admitted Miss Winch, chummily.

“Then why are you doing it?”

Fillmore's fiancée revolved the criticized refreshment about her tongue
for a moment before replying.

“Bit o' business,” she announced, at length.

“What do you mean, a bit of business?”

“Character stuff,” explained Miss Winch in her pleasant, drawling voice.
“Thought it out myself. Maids chew gum, you know.”

Mr. Bunbury ruffled his orange hair in an over-wrought manner with the
palm of his right hand.

“Have you ever seen a maid?” he asked, despairingly.

“Yes, sir. And they chew gum.”

“I mean a parlour-maid in a smart house,” moaned Mr. Bunbury. “Do you
imagine for a moment that in a house such as this is supposed to be the
parlour-maid would be allowed to come into the drawing-room champing that
disgusting, beastly stuff?”

Miss Winch considered the point.

“Maybe you're right.” She brightened. “Listen! Great idea! Mr. Foster can
write in a line for Elsa, calling me down, and another giving me a good
come-back, and then another for Elsa saying something else, and then
something really funny for me, and so on. We can work it up into a big
comic scene. Five or six minutes, all laughs.”

This ingenious suggestion had the effect of depriving the producer
momentarily of speech, and while he was struggling for utterance, there
dashed out from the wings a gorgeous being in blue velvet and a hat of
such unimpeachable smartness that Sally ached at the sight of it with a
spasm of pure envy.

“Say!”

Miss Mabel Hobson had practically every personal advantage which nature
can bestow with the exception of a musical voice. Her figure was perfect,
her face beautiful, and her hair a mass of spun gold; but her voice in
moments of emotion was the voice of a peacock.

“Say, listen to me for just one moment!”

Mr. Bunbury recovered from his trance.

“Miss Hobson! Please!”

“Yes, that's all very well...”

“You are interrupting the rehearsal.”

“You bet your sorrowful existence I'm interrupting the rehearsal,” agreed
Miss Hobson, with emphasis. “And, if you want to make a little easy money,
you go and bet somebody ten seeds that I'm going to interrupt it again
every time there's any talk of writing up any darned part in the show
except mine. Write up other people's parts? Not while I have my strength!”

A young man with butter-coloured hair, who had entered from the wings in
close attendance on the injured lady, attempted to calm the storm.

“Now, sweetie!”

“Oh, can it, Reggie!” said Miss Hobson, curtly.

Mr. Cracknell obediently canned it. He was not one of your brutal
cave-men. He subsided into the recesses of a high collar and began to chew
the knob of his stick.

“I'm the star,” resumed Miss Hobson, vehemently, “and, if you think
anybody else's part's going to be written up... well, pardon me while I
choke with laughter! If so much as a syllable is written into anybody's
part, I walk straight out on my two feet. You won't see me go, I'll be so
quick.”

Mr. Bunbury sprang to his feet and waved his hands.

“For heaven's sake! Are we rehearsing, or is this a debating society? Miss
Hobson, nothing is going to be written into anybody's part. Now are you
satisfied?”

“She said...”

“Oh, never mind,” observed Miss Winch, equably. “It was only a random
thought. Working for the good of the show all the time. That's me.”

“Now, sweetie!” pleaded Mr. Cracknell, emerging from the collar like a
tortoise.

Miss Hobson reluctantly allowed herself to be reassured.

“Oh, well, that's all right, then. But don't forget I know how to look
after myself,” she said, stating a fact which was abundantly obvious to
all who had had the privilege of listening to her. “Any raw work, and out
I walk so quick it'll make you giddy.”

She retired, followed by Mr. Cracknell, and the wings swallowed her up.

“Shall I say my big speech now?” inquired Miss Winch, over the footlights.

“Yes, yes! Get on with the rehearsal. We've wasted half the morning.”

“Did you ring, madam?” said Miss Winch to Elsa, who had been reading her
magazine placidly through the late scene.

The rehearsal proceeded, and Sally watched it with a sinking heart. It was
all wrong. Novice as she was in things theatrical, she could see that.
There was no doubt that Miss Hobson was superbly beautiful and would have
shed lustre on any part which involved the minimum of words and the
maximum of clothes: but in the pivotal role of a serious play, her very
physical attributes only served to emphasize and point her hopeless
incapacity. Sally remembered Mr. Faucitt's story of the lady who got the
bird at Wigan. She did not see how history could fail to repeat itself.
The theatrical public of America will endure much from youth and beauty,
but there is a limit.

A shrill, passionate cry from the front row, and Mr. Bunbury was on his
feet again. Sally could not help wondering whether things were going
particularly wrong to-day, or whether this was one of Mr. Bunbury's
ordinary mornings.

“Miss Hobson!”

The action of the drama had just brought that emotional lady on left
centre and had taken her across to the desk which stood on the other side
of the stage. The desk was an important feature of the play, for it
symbolized the absorption in business which, exhibited by her husband, was
rapidly breaking Miss Hobson's heart. He loved his desk better than his
young wife, that was what it amounted to, and no wife can stand that sort
of thing.

“Oh, gee!” said Miss Hobson, ceasing to be the distressed wife and
becoming the offended star. “What's it this time?”

“I suggested at the last rehearsal and at the rehearsal before and the
rehearsal before that, that, on that line, you, should pick up the
paper-knife and toy negligently with it. You did it yesterday, and to-day
you've forgotten it again.”

“My God!” cried Miss Hobson, wounded to the quick. “If this don't beat
everything! How the heck can I toy negligently with a paper-knife when
there's no paper-knife for me to toy negligently with?”

“The paper-knife is on the desk.”

“It's not on the desk.”

“No paper-knife?”

“No paper-knife. And it's no good picking on me. I'm the star, not the
assistant stage manager. If you're going to pick on anybody, pick on him.”

The advice appeared to strike Mr. Bunbury as good. He threw back his head
and bayed like a bloodhound.

There was a momentary pause, and then from the wings on the prompt side
there shambled out a stout and shrinking figure, in whose hand was a
script of the play and on whose face, lit up by the footlights, there
shone a look of apprehension. It was Fillmore, the Man of Destiny.

3

Alas, poor Fillmore! He stood in the middle of the stage with the
lightning of Mr. Bunbury's wrath playing about his defenceless head, and
Sally, recovering from her first astonishment, sent a wave of sisterly
commiseration floating across the theatre to him. She did not often pity
Fillmore. His was a nature which in the sunshine of prosperity had a
tendency to grow a trifle lush; and such of the minor ills of life as had
afflicted him during the past three years, had, she considered, been
wholesome and educative and a matter not for concern but for
congratulation. Unmoved, she had watched him through that lean period
lunching on coffee and buckwheat cakes, and curbing from motives of
economy a somewhat florid taste in dress. But this was different. This was
tragedy. Somehow or other, blasting disaster must have smitten the
Fillmore bank-roll, and he was back where he had started. His presence
here this morning could mean nothing else.

She recalled his words at the breakfast-table about financing the play.
How like Fillmore to try to save his face for the moment with an
outrageous bluff, though well aware that he would have to reveal the truth
sooner or later. She realized how he must have felt when he had seen her
at the hotel. Yes, she was sorry for Fillmore.

And, as she listened to the fervent eloquence of Mr. Bunbury, she
perceived that she had every reason to be. Fillmore was having a bad time.
One of the chief articles of faith in the creed of all theatrical
producers is that if anything goes wrong it must be the fault of the
assistant stage manager and Mr. Bunbury was evidently orthodox in his
views. He was showing oratorical gifts of no mean order. The paper-knife
seemed to inspire him. Gradually, Sally began to get the feeling that this
harmless, necessary stage-property was the source from which sprang most,
if not all, of the trouble in the world. It had disappeared before. Now it
had disappeared again. Could Mr. Bunbury go on struggling in a universe
where this sort of thing happened? He seemed to doubt it. Being a
red-blooded, one-hundred-per-cent American man, he would try hard, but it
was a hundred to one shot that he would get through. He had asked for a
paper-knife. There was no paper-knife. Why was there no paper-knife? Where
was the paper-knife anyway?

“I assure you, Mr. Bunbury,” bleated the unhappy Fillmore, obsequiously.
“I placed it with the rest of the properties after the last rehearsal.”

“You couldn't have done.”

“I assure you I did.”

“And it walked away, I suppose,” said Miss Hobson with cold scorn, pausing
in the operation of brightening up her lower lip with a lip-stick.

A calm, clear voice spoke.

“It was taken away,” said the calm, clear voice.

Miss Winch had added herself to the symposium. She stood beside Fillmore,
chewing placidly. It took more than raised voices and gesticulating hands
to disturb Miss Winch.

“Miss Hobson took it,” she went on in her cosy, drawling voice. “I saw
her.”

Sensation in court. The prisoner, who seemed to feel his position deeply,
cast a pop-eyed glance full of gratitude at his advocate. Mr. Bunbury, in
his capacity of prosecuting attorney, ran his fingers through his hair in
some embarrassment, for he was regretting now that he had made such a
fuss. Miss Hobson thus assailed by an underling, spun round and dropped
the lip-stick, which was neatly retrieved by the assiduous Mr. Cracknell.
Mr. Cracknell had his limitations, but he was rather good at picking up
lip-sticks.

“What's that? I took it? I never did anything of the sort.”

“Miss Hobson took it after the rehearsal yesterday,” drawled Gladys Winch,
addressing the world in general, “and threw it negligently at the theatre
cat.”

Miss Hobson seemed taken aback. Her composure was not restored by Mr.
Bunbury's next remark. The producer, like his company, had been feeling
the strain of the past few days, and, though as a rule he avoided anything
in the nature of a clash with the temperamental star, this matter of the
missing paper-knife had bitten so deeply into his soul that he felt
compelled to speak his mind.

“In future, Miss Hobson, I should be glad if, when you wish to throw
anything at the cat, you would not select a missile from the property box.
Good heavens!” he cried, stung by the way fate was maltreating him, “I
have never experienced anything like this before. I have been producing
plays all my life, and this is the first time this has happened. I have
produced Nazimova. Nazimova never threw paper-knives at cats.”

“Well, I hate cats,” said Miss Hobson, as though that settled it.

“I,” murmured Miss Winch, “love little pussy, her fur is so warm, and if I
don't hurt her she'll do me no...”

“Oh, my heavens!” shouted Gerald Foster, bounding from his seat and for
the first time taking a share in the debate. “Are we going to spend the
whole day arguing about cats and paper-knives? For goodness' sake, clear
the stage and stop wasting time.”

Miss Hobson chose to regard this intervention as an affront.

“Don't shout at me, Mr. Foster!”

“I wasn't shouting at you.”

“If you have anything to say to me, lower your voice.”

“He can't,” observed Miss Winch. “He's a tenor.”

“Nazimova never...” began Mr. Bunbury.

Miss Hobson was not to be diverted from her theme by reminiscences of
Nazimova. She had not finished dealing with Gerald.

“In the shows I've been in,” she said, mordantly, “the author wasn't
allowed to go about the place getting fresh with the leading lady. In the
shows I've been in the author sat at the back and spoke when he was spoken
to. In the shows I've been in...”

Sally was tingling all over. This reminded her of the dog-fight on the
Roville sands. She wanted to be in it, and only the recognition that it
was a private fight and that she would be intruding kept her silent. The
lure of the fray, however, was too strong for her wholly to resist it.
Almost unconsciously, she had risen from her place and drifted down the
aisle so as to be nearer the white-hot centre of things. She was now
standing in the lighted space by the orchestra-pit, and her presence
attracted the roving attention of Miss Hobson, who, having concluded her
remarks on authors and their legitimate sphere of activity, was looking
about for some other object of attack.

“Who the devil,” inquired Miss Hobson, “is that?”

Sally found herself an object of universal scrutiny and wished that she
had remained in the obscurity of the back rows.

“I am Mr. Nicholas' sister,” was the best method of identification that
she could find.

“Who's Mr. Nicholas?”

Fillmore timidly admitted that he was Mr. Nicholas. He did it in the
manner of one in the dock pleading guilty to a major charge, and at least
half of those present seemed surprised. To them, till now, Fillmore had
been a nameless thing, answering to the shout of “Hi!”

Miss Hobson received the information with a laugh of such exceeding
bitterness that strong men blanched and Mr. Cracknell started so
convulsively that he nearly jerked his collar off its stud.

“Now, sweetie!” urged Mr. Cracknell.

Miss Hobson said that Mr. Cracknell gave her a pain in the gizzard. She
recommended his fading away, and he did so—into his collar. He
seemed to feel that once well inside his collar he was “home” and safe
from attack.

“I'm through!” announced Miss Hobson. It appeared that Sally's presence
had in some mysterious fashion fulfilled the function of the last straw.
“This is the by-Goddest show I was ever in! I can stand for a whole lot,
but when it comes to the assistant stage manager being allowed to fill the
theatre with his sisters and his cousins and his aunts it's time to quit.”

“But, sweetie!” pleaded Mr. Cracknell, coming to the surface.

“Oh, go and choke yourself!” said Miss Hobson, crisply. And, swinging
round like a blue panther, she strode off. A door banged, and the sound of
it seemed to restore Mr. Cracknell's power of movement. He, too, shot up
stage and disappeared.

“Hello, Sally,” said Elsa Doland, looking up from her magazine. The
battle, raging all round her, had failed to disturb her detachment. “When
did you get back?”

Sally trotted up the steps which had been propped against the stage to
form a bridge over the orchestra pit.

“Hello, Elsa.”

The late debaters had split into groups. Mr. Bunbury and Gerald were
pacing up and down the central aisle, talking earnestly. Fillmore had
subsided into a chair.

“Do you know Gladys Winch?” asked Elsa.

Sally shook hands with the placid lodestar of her brother's affections.
Miss Winch, on closer inspection, proved to have deep grey eyes and
freckles. Sally's liking for her increased.

“Thank you for saving Fillmore from the wolves,” she said. “They would
have torn him in pieces but for you.”

“Oh, I don't know,” said Miss Winch.

“It was noble.”

“Oh, well!”

“I think,” said Sally, “I'll go and have a talk with Fillmore. He looks as
though he wanted consoling.”

She made her way to that picturesque ruin.

4

Fillmore had the air of a man who thought it wasn't loaded. A wild,
startled expression had settled itself upon his face and he was breathing
heavily.

“Cheer up!” said Sally. Fillmore jumped like a stricken jelly. “Tell me
all,” said Sally, sitting down beside him. “I leave you a gentleman of
large and independent means, and I come back and find you one of the
wage-slaves again. How did it all happen?”

“Sally,” said Fillmore, “I will be frank with you. Can you lend me ten
dollars?”

“I don't see how you make that out an answer to my question, but here you
are.”

“Thanks.” Fillmore pocketed the bill. “I'll let you have it back next
week. I want to take Miss Winch out to lunch.”

“If that's what you want it for, don't look on it as a loan, take it as a
gift with my blessing thrown in.” She looked over her shoulder at Miss
Winch, who, the cares of rehearsal being temporarily suspended, was
practising golf-shots with an umbrella at the other side of the stage.
“However did you have the sense to fall in love with her, Fill?”

“Do you like her?” asked Fillmore, brightening.

“I love her.”

“I knew you would. She's just the right girl for me, isn't she?”

“She certainly is.”

“So sympathetic.”

“Yes.”

“So kind.”

“Yes.”

“And she's got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl
who marries you will need.”

Fillmore drew himself up with as much hauteur as a stout man sitting in a
low chair can achieve.

“Some day I will make you believe in me, Sally.”

“Less of the Merchant Prince, my lad,” said Sally, firmly. “You just
confine yourself to explaining how you got this way, instead of taking up
my valuable time telling me what you mean to do in the future. You've lost
all your money?”

“I have suffered certain reverses,” said Fillmore, with dignity, “which
have left me temporarily... Yes, every bean,” he concluded simply.

“How?”

“Well...” Fillmore hesitated. “I've had bad luck, you know. First I bought
Consolidated Rails for the rise, and they fell. So that went wrong.”

“Yes?”

“And then I bought Russian Roubles for the fall, and they rose. So that
went wrong.”

“Good gracious! Why, I've heard all this before.”

“Who told you?”

“No, I remember now. It's just that you remind me of a man I met at
Roville. He was telling me the story of his life, and how he had made a
hash of everything. Well, that took all you had, I suppose?”

“Not quite. I had a few thousand left, and I went into a deal that really
did look cast-iron.”

“And that went wrong!”

“It wasn't my fault,” said Fillmore querulously. “It was just my poisonous
luck. A man I knew got me to join a syndicate which had bought up a lot of
whisky. The idea was to ship it into Chicago in herring-barrels. We should
have cleaned up big, only a mutt of a detective took it into his darned
head to go fooling about with a crowbar. Officious ass! It wasn't as if
the barrels weren't labelled 'Herrings' as plainly as they could be,” said
Fillmore with honest indignation. He shuddered. “I nearly got arrested.”

“But that went wrong? Well, that's something to be thankful for. Stripes
wouldn't suit your figure.” Sally gave his arm a squeeze. She was very
fond of Fillmore, though for the good of his soul she generally concealed
her affection beneath a manner which he had once compared, not without
some reason, to that of a governess who had afflicted their mutual
childhood. “Never mind, you poor ill-used martyr. Things are sure to come
right. We shall see you a millionaire some day. And, oh heavens, brother
Fillmore, what a bore you'll be when you are! I can just see you being
interviewed and giving hints to young men on how to make good. 'Mr.
Nicholas attributes his success to sheer hard work. He can lay his hand on
his bulging waistcoat and say that he has never once indulged in those
rash get-rich-quick speculations, where you buy for the rise and watch
things fall and then rush out and buy for the fall and watch 'em rise.'
Fill... I'll tell you what I'll do. They all say it's the first bit of
money that counts in building a vast fortune. I'll lend you some of mine.”

“You will? Sally, I always said you were an ace.”

“I never heard you. You oughtn't to mumble so.”

“Will you lend me twenty thousand dollars?”

Sally patted his hand soothingly.

“Come slowly down to earth,” she said. “Two hundred was the sum I had in
mind.”

“I want twenty thousand.”

“You'd better rob a bank. Any policeman will direct you to a good bank.”

“I'll tell you why I want twenty thousand.”

“You might just mention it.”

“If I had twenty thousand, I'd buy this production from Cracknell. He'll
be back in a few minutes to tell us that the Hobson woman has quit: and,
if she really has, you take it from me that he will close the show. And,
even if he manages to jolly her along this time and she comes back, it's
going to happen sooner or later. It's a shame to let a show like this
close. I believe in it, Sally. It's a darn good play. With Elsa Doland in
the big part, it couldn't fail.”

Sally started. Her money was too recent for her to have grown fully
accustomed to it, and she had never realized that she was in a position to
wave a wand and make things happen on any big scale. The financing of a
theatrical production had always been to her something mysterious and out
of the reach of ordinary persons like herself. Fillmore, that spacious
thinker, had brought it into the sphere of the possible.

“He'd sell for less than that, of course, but one would need a bit in
hand. You have to face a loss on the road before coming into New York. I'd
give you ten per cent on your money, Sally.”

Sally found herself wavering. The prudent side of her nature, which
hitherto had steered her safely through most of life's rapids, seemed
oddly dormant. Sub-consciously she was aware that on past performances
Fillmore was decidedly not the man to be allowed control of anybody's
little fortune, but somehow the thought did not seem to grip her. He had
touched her imagination.

“It's a gold-mine!”

Sally's prudent side stirred in its sleep. Fillmore had chosen an
unfortunate expression. To the novice in finance the word gold-mine had
repellent associations. If there was one thing in which Sally had proposed
not to invest her legacy, it was a gold-mine; what she had had in view, as
a matter of fact, had been one of those little fancy shops which are
called Ye Blue Bird or Ye Corner Shoppe, or something like that, where you
sell exotic bric-a-brac to the wealthy at extortionate prices. She knew
two girls who were doing splendidly in that line. As Fillmore spoke those
words, Ye Corner Shoppe suddenly looked very good to her.

At this moment, however, two things happened. Gerald and Mr. Bunbury, in
the course of their perambulations, came into the glow of the footlights,
and she was able to see Gerald's face: and at the same time Mr. Reginald
Cracknell hurried on to the stage, his whole demeanour that of the bearer
of evil tidings.

The sight of Gerald's face annihilated Sally's prudence at a single
stroke. Ye Corner Shoppe, which a moment before had been shining brightly
before her mental eye, flickered and melted out. The whole issue became
clear and simple. Gerald was miserable and she had it in her power to make
him happy. He was sullenly awaiting disaster and she with a word could
avert it. She wondered that she had ever hesitated.

“All right,” she said simply.

Fillmore quivered from head to foot. A powerful electric shock could not
have produced a stronger convulsion. He knew Sally of old as cautious and
clear-headed, by no means to be stampeded by a brother's eloquence; and he
had never looked on this thing as anything better than a hundred to one
shot.

“You'll do it?” he whispered, and held his breath. After all he might not
have heard correctly.

“Yes.”

All the complex emotion in Fillmore's soul found expression in one vast
whoop. It rang through the empty theatre like the last trump, beating
against the back wall and rising in hollow echoes to the very gallery. Mr.
Bunbury, conversing in low undertones with Mr. Cracknell across the
footlights, shied like a startled mule. There was reproach and menace in
the look he cast at Fillmore, and a minute earlier it would have reduced
that financial magnate to apologetic pulp. But Fillmore was not to be
intimidated now by a look. He strode down to the group at the footlights,

“Cracknell,” he said importantly, “one moment, I should like a word with
you.”

CHAPTER VII. SOME MEDITATIONS ON SUCCESS

If actors and actresses are like children in that they are readily
depressed by disaster, they have the child's compensating gift of being
easily uplifted by good fortune. It amazed Sally that any one mortal
should have been able to spread such universal happiness as she had done
by the simple act of lending her brother Fillmore twenty thousand dollars.
If the Millennium had arrived, the members of the Primrose Way Company
could not have been on better terms with themselves. The lethargy and
dispiritedness, caused by their week of inaction, fell from them like a
cloak. The sudden elevation of that creature of the abyss, the assistant
stage manager, to the dizzy height of proprietor of the show appealed to
their sense of drama. Most of them had played in pieces where much the
same thing had happened to the persecuted heroine round about eleven
o'clock, and the situation struck them as theatrically sound. Also, now
that she had gone, the extent to which Miss Hobson had acted as a blight
was universally recognized.

A spirit of optimism reigned, and cheerful rumours became current. The
bowler-hatted Teddy had it straight from the lift-boy at his hotel that
the ban on the theatres was to be lifted on Tuesday at the latest; while
no less an authority than the cigar-stand girl at the Pontchatrain had
informed the man who played the butler that Toledo and Cleveland were
opening to-morrow. It was generally felt that the sun was bursting through
the clouds and that Fate would soon despair of the hopeless task of trying
to keep good men down.

Fillmore was himself again. We all have our particular mode of
self-expression in moments of elation. Fillmore's took the shape of buying
a new waistcoat and a hundred half-dollar cigars and being very fussy
about what he had for lunch. It may have been an optical illusion, but he
appeared to Sally to put on at least six pounds in weight on the first day
of the new regime. As a serf looking after paper-knives and other
properties, he had been—for him—almost slim. As a manager he
blossomed out into soft billowy curves, and when he stood on the sidewalk
in front of the theatre, gloating over the new posters which bore the
legend,

     FILLMORE NICHOLAS

     PRESENTS

the populace had to make a detour to get round him.

In this era of bubbling joy, it was hard that Sally, the fairy godmother
responsible for it all, should not have been completely happy too; and it
puzzled her why she was not. But whatever it was that cast the faint
shadow refused obstinately to come out from the back of her mind and show
itself and be challenged. It was not till she was out driving in a hired
car with Gerald one afternoon on Belle Isle that enlightenment came.

Gerald, since the departure of Miss Hobson, had been at his best. Like
Fillmore, he was a man who responded to the sunshine of prosperity. His
moodiness had vanished, and all his old charm had returned. And yet... it
seemed to Sally, as the car slid smoothly through the pleasant woods and
fields by the river, that there was something that jarred.

Gerald was cheerful and talkative. He, at any rate, found nothing wrong
with life. He held forth spaciously on the big things he intended to do.

“If this play get over—and it's going to—I'll show 'em!” His
jaw was squared, and his eyes glowed as they stared into the inviting
future. “One success—that's all I need—then watch me! I
haven't had a chance yet, but...”

His voice rolled on, but Sally had ceased to listen. It was the time of
year when the chill of evening follows swiftly on the mellow warmth of
afternoon. The sun had gone behind the trees, and a cold wind was blowing
up from the river. And quite suddenly, as though it was the wind that had
cleared her mind, she understood what it was that had been lurking at the
back of her thoughts. For an instant it stood out nakedly without
concealment, and the world became a forlorn place. She had realized the
fundamental difference between man's outlook on life and woman's.

Success! How men worshipped it, and how little of themselves they had to
spare for anything else. Ironically, it was the theme of this very play of
Gerald's which she had saved from destruction. Of all the men she knew,
how many had any view of life except as a race which they must strain
every nerve to win, regardless of what they missed by the wayside in their
haste? Fillmore—Gerald—all of them. There might be a woman in
each of their lives, but she came second—an afterthought—a
thing for their spare time. Gerald was everything to her. His success
would never be more than a side-issue as far as she was concerned. He
himself, without any of the trappings of success, was enough for her. But
she was not enough for him. A spasm of futile jealousy shook her. She
shivered.

“Cold?” said Gerald. “I'll tell the man to drive back... I don't see any
reason why this play shouldn't run a year in New York. Everybody says it's
good... if it does get over, they'll all be after me. I...”

Sally stared out into a bleak world. The sky was a leaden grey, and the
wind from the river blew with a dismal chill.

CHAPTER VIII. REAPPEARANCE OF MR. CARMYLE—AND GINGER

1

When Sally left Detroit on the following Saturday, accompanied by
Fillmore, who was returning to the metropolis for a few days in order to
secure offices and generally make his presence felt along Broadway, her
spirits had completely recovered. She felt guiltily that she had been
fanciful, even morbid. Naturally men wanted to get on in the world. It was
their job. She told herself that she was bound up with Gerald's success,
and that the last thing of which she ought to complain was the energy he
put into efforts of which she as well as he would reap the reward.

To this happier frame of mind the excitement of the last few days had
contributed. Detroit, that city of amiable audiences, had liked “The
Primrose Way.” The theatre, in fulfilment of Teddy's prophecy, had been
allowed to open on the Tuesday, and a full house, hungry for entertainment
after its enforced abstinence, had welcomed the play wholeheartedly. The
papers, not always in agreement with the applause of a first-night
audience, had on this occasion endorsed the verdict, with agreeable
unanimity hailing Gerald as the coming author and Elsa Doland as the
coming star. There had even been a brief mention of Fillmore as the coming
manager. But there is always some trifle that jars in our greatest
moments, and Fillmore's triumph had been almost spoilt by the fact that
the only notice taken of Gladys Winch was by the critic who printed her
name—spelt Wunch—in the list of those whom the cast “also
included.”

“One of the greatest character actresses on the stage,” said Fillmore
bitterly, talking over this outrage with Sally on the morning after the
production.

From this blow, however, his buoyant nature had soon enabled him to rally.
Life contained so much that was bright that it would have been churlish to
concentrate the attention on the one dark spot. Business had been
excellent all through the week. Elsa Doland had got better at every
performance. The receipt of a long and agitated telegram from Mr.
Cracknell, pleading to be allowed to buy the piece back, the passage of
time having apparently softened Miss Hobson, was a pleasant incident. And,
best of all, the great Ike Schumann, who owned half the theatres in New
York and had been in Detroit superintending one of his musical
productions, had looked in one evening and stamped “The Primrose Way” with
the seal of his approval. As Fillmore sat opposite Sally on the train, he
radiated contentment and importance.

“Yes, do,” said Sally, breaking a long silence.

Fillmore awoke from happy dreams.

“Eh?”

“I said 'Yes, do.' I think you owe it to your position.”

“Do what?”

“Buy a fur coat. Wasn't that what you were meditating about?”

“Don't be a chump,” said Fillmore, blushing nevertheless. It was true that
once or twice during the past week he had toyed negligently, as Mr.
Bunbury would have said, with the notion, and why not? A fellow must keep
warm.

“With an astrakhan collar,” insisted Sally.

“As a matter of fact,” said Fillmore loftily, his great soul ill-attuned
to this badinage, “what I was really thinking about at the moment was
something Ike said.”

“Ike?”

“Ike Schumann. He's on the train. I met him just now.”

“We call him Ike!”

“Of course I call him Ike,” said Fillmore heatedly. “Everyone calls him
Ike.”

“He wears a fur coat,” Sally murmured.

Fillmore registered annoyance.

“I wish you wouldn't keep on harping on that damned coat. And, anyway, why
shouldn't I have a fur coat?”

“Fill...! How can you be so brutal as to suggest that I ever said you
shouldn't? Why, I'm one of the strongest supporters of the fur coat. With
big cuffs. And you must roll up Fifth Avenue in your car, and I'll point
and say 'That's my brother!' 'Your brother? No!' 'He is, really.' 'You're
joking. Why, that's the great Fillmore Nicholas.' 'I know. But he really
is my brother. And I was with him when he bought that coat.'”

“Do leave off about the coat!”

“'And it isn't only the coat,' I shall say. 'It's what's underneath.
Tucked away inside that mass of fur, dodging about behind that dollar
cigar, is one to whom we point with pride... '”

Fillmore looked coldly at his watch.

“I've got to go and see Ike Schumann.”

“We are in hourly consultation with Ike.”

“He wants to see me about the show. He suggests putting it into Chicago
before opening in New York.”

“Oh no,” cried Sally, dismayed.

“Why not?”

Sally recovered herself. Identifying Gerald so closely with his play, she
had supposed for a moment that if the piece opened in Chicago it would
mean a further prolonged separation from him. But of course there would be
no need, she realized, for him to stay with the company after the first
day or two.

“You're thinking that we ought to have a New York reputation before
tackling Chicago. There's a lot to be said for that. Still, it works both
ways. A Chicago run would help us in New York. Well, I'll have to think it
over,” said Fillmore, importantly, “I'll have to think it over.”

He mused with drawn brows.

“All wrong,” said Sally.

“Eh?”

“Not a bit like it. The lips should be compressed and the forefinger of
the right hand laid in a careworn way against the right temple. You've a
lot to learn. Fill.”

“Oh, stop it!”

“Fillmore Nicholas,” said Sally, “if you knew what pain it gives me to
josh my only brother, you'd be sorry for me. But you know it's for your
good. Now run along and put Ike out of his misery. I know he's waiting for
you with his watch out. 'You do think he'll come, Miss Nicholas?' were his
last words to me as he stepped on the train, and oh, Fill, the yearning in
his voice. 'Why, of course he will, Mr. Schumann,' I said. 'For all his
exalted position, my brother is kindliness itself. Of course he'll come.'
'If I could only think so!' he said with a gulp. 'If I could only think
so. But you know what these managers are. A thousand calls on their time.
They get brooding on their fur coats and forget everything else.' 'Have no
fear, Mr. Schumann,' I said. 'Fillmore Nicholas is a man of his word.'”

She would have been willing, for she was a girl who never believed in
sparing herself where it was a question of entertaining her nearest and
dearest, to continue the dialogue, but Fillmore was already moving down
the car, his rigid back a silent protest against sisterly levity. Sally
watched him disappear, then picked up a magazine and began to read.

She had just finished tracking a story of gripping interest through a
jungle of advertisements, only to find that it was in two parts, of which
the one she was reading was the first, when a voice spoke.

“How do you do, Miss Nicholas?”

Into the seat before her, recently released from the weight of the coming
manager, Bruce Carmyle of all people in the world insinuated himself with
that well-bred air of deferential restraint which never left him.

2

Sally was considerably startled. Everybody travels nowadays, of course,
and there is nothing really remarkable in finding a man in America whom
you had supposed to be in Europe: but nevertheless she was conscious of a
dream-like sensation, as though the clock had been turned back and a
chapter of her life reopened which she had thought closed for ever.

“Mr. Carmyle!” she cried.

If Sally had been constantly in Bruce Carmyle's thoughts since they had
parted on the Paris express, Mr. Carmyle had been very little in Sally's—so
little, indeed, that she had had to search her memory for a moment before
she identified him.

“We're always meeting on trains, aren't we?” she went on, her composure
returning. “I never expected to see you in America.”

“I came over.”

Sally was tempted to reply that she gathered that, but a sudden
embarrassment curbed her tongue. She had just remembered that at their
last meeting she had been abominably rude to this man. She was never rude
to anyone, without subsequent remorse. She contented herself with a tame
“Yes.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Carmyle, “it is a good many years since I have taken a
real holiday. My doctor seemed to think I was a trifle run down. It seemed
a good opportunity to visit America. Everybody,” said Mr. Carmyle
oracularly, endeavouring, as he had often done since his ship had left
England, to persuade himself that his object in making the trip had not
been merely to renew his acquaintance with Sally, “everybody ought to
visit America at least once. It is part of one's education.”

“And what are your impressions of our glorious country?” said Sally
rallying.

Mr. Carmyle seemed glad of the opportunity of lecturing on an impersonal
subject. He, too, though his face had shown no trace of it, had been
embarrassed in the opening stages of the conversation. The sound of his
voice restored him.

“I have been visiting Chicago,” he said after a brief travelogue.

“Oh!”

“A wonderful city.”

“I've never seen it. I've come from Detroit.”

“Yes, I heard you were in Detroit.”

Sally's eyes opened.

“You heard I was in Detroit? Good gracious! How?”

“I—ah—called at your New York address and made inquiries,”
said Mr. Carmyle a little awkwardly.

“But how did you know where I lived?”

“My cousin—er—Lancelot told me.”

Sally was silent for a moment. She had much the same feeling that comes to
the man in the detective story who realizes that he is being shadowed.
Even if this almost complete stranger had not actually come to America in
direct pursuit of her, there was no disguising the fact that he evidently
found her an object of considerable interest. It was a compliment, but
Sally was not at all sure that she liked it. Bruce Carmyle meant nothing
to her, and it was rather disturbing to find that she was apparently of
great importance to him. She seized on the mention of Ginger as a lever
for diverting the conversation from its present too intimate course.

“How is Mr. Kemp?” she asked.

Mr. Carmyle's dark face seemed to become a trifle darker.

“We have had no news of him,” he said shortly.

“No news? How do you mean? You speak as though he had disappeared.”

“He has disappeared!”

“Good heavens! When?”

“Shortly after I saw you last.”

“Disappeared!”

Mr. Carmyle frowned. Sally, watching him, found her antipathy stirring
again. There was something about this man which she had disliked
instinctively from the first, a sort of hardness.

“But where has he gone to?”

“I don't know.” Mr. Carmyle frowned again. The subject of Ginger was
plainly a sore one. “And I don't want to know,” he went on heatedly, a
dull flush rising in the cheeks which Sally was sure he had to shave twice
a day. “I don't care to know. The Family have washed their hands of him.
For the future he may look after himself as best he can. I believe he is
off his head.”

Sally's rebellious temper was well ablaze now, but she fought it down. She
would dearly have loved to give battle to Mr. Carmyle—it was odd,
she felt, how she seemed to have constituted herself Ginger's champion and
protector—but she perceived that, if she wished, as she did, to hear
more of her red-headed friend, he must be humoured and conciliated.

“But what happened? What was all the trouble about?”

Mr. Carmyle's eyebrows met.

“He—insulted his uncle. His uncle Donald. He insulted him—grossly.
The one man in the world he should have made a point of—er—”

“Keeping in with?”

“Yes. His future depended upon him.”

“But what did he do?” cried Sally, trying hard to keep a thoroughly
reprehensible joy out of her voice.

“I have heard no details. My uncle is reticent as to what actually took
place. He invited Lancelot to dinner to discuss his plans, and it appears
that Lancelot—defied him. Defied him! He was rude and insulting. My
uncle refuses to have anything more to do with him. Apparently the young
fool managed to win some money at the tables at Roville, and this seems to
have turned his head completely. My uncle insists that he is mad. I agree
with him. Since the night of that dinner nothing has been heard of
Lancelot.”

Mr. Carmyle broke off to brood once more, and before Sally could speak the
impressive bulk of Fillmore loomed up in the aisle beside them.
Explanations seemed to Fillmore to be in order. He cast a questioning
glance at the mysterious stranger, who, in addition to being in
conversation with his sister, had collared his seat.

“Oh, hullo, Fill,” said Sally. “Fillmore, this is Mr. Carmyle. We met
abroad. My brother Fillmore, Mr. Carmyle.”

Proper introduction having been thus effected, Fillmore approved of Mr.
Carmyle. His air of being someone in particular appealed to him.

“Strange you meeting again like this,” he said affably.

The porter, who had been making up berths along the car, was now hovering
expectantly in the offing.

“You two had better go into the smoking room,” suggested Sally. “I'm going
to bed.”

She wanted to be alone, to think. Mr. Carmyle's tale of a roused and
revolting Ginger had stirred her.

The two men went off to the smoking-room, and Sally found an empty seat
and sat down to wait for her berth to be made up. She was aglow with a
curious exhilaration. So Ginger had taken her advice! Excellent Ginger!
She felt proud of him. She also had that feeling of complacency, amounting
almost to sinful pride, which comes to those who give advice and find it
acted upon. She had the emotions of a creator. After all, had she not
created this new Ginger? It was she who had stirred him up. It was she who
had unleashed him. She had changed him from a meek dependent of the Family
to a ravening creature, who went about the place insulting uncles.

It was a feat, there was no denying it. It was something attempted,
something done: and by all the rules laid down by the poet it should,
therefore, have earned a night's repose. Yet, Sally, jolted by the train,
which towards the small hours seemed to be trying out some new
buck-and-wing steps of its own invention, slept ill, and presently, as she
lay awake, there came to her bedside the Spectre of Doubt, gaunt and
questioning. Had she, after all, wrought so well? Had she been wise in
tampering with this young man's life?

“What about it?” said the Spectre of Doubt.

3

Daylight brought no comforting answer to the question. Breakfast failed to
manufacture an easy mind. Sally got off the train, at the Grand Central
station in a state of remorseful concern. She declined the offer of Mr.
Carmyle to drive her to the boarding-house, and started to walk there,
hoping that the crisp morning air would effect a cure.

She wondered now how she could ever have looked with approval on her rash
act. She wondered what demon of interference and meddling had possessed
her, to make her blunder into people's lives, upsetting them. She wondered
that she was allowed to go around loose. She was nothing more nor less
than a menace to society. Here was an estimable young man, obviously the
sort of young man who would always have to be assisted through life by his
relatives, and she had deliberately egged him on to wreck his prospects.
She blushed hotly as she remembered that mad wireless she had sent him
from the boat.

Miserable Ginger! She pictured him, his little stock of money gone,
wandering foot-sore about London, seeking in vain for work; forcing
himself to call on Uncle Donald; being thrown down the front steps by
haughty footmen; sleeping on the Embankment; gazing into the dark waters
of the Thames with the stare of hopelessness; climbing to the parapet
and...

“Ugh!” said Sally.

She had arrived at the door of the boarding-house, and Mrs. Meecher was
regarding her with welcoming eyes, little knowing that to all practical
intents and purposes she had slain in his prime a red-headed young man of
amiable manners and—when not ill-advised by meddling, muddling
females—of excellent behaviour.

Mrs. Meecher was friendly and garrulous. Variety, the journal which, next
to the dog Toto, was the thing she loved best in the world, had informed
her on the Friday morning that Mr. Foster's play had got over big in
Detroit, and that Miss Doland had made every kind of hit. It was not often
that the old alumni of the boarding-house forced their way after this
fashion into the Hall of Fame, and, according to Mrs. Meecher, the
establishment was ringing with the news. That blue ribbon round Toto's
neck was worn in honour of the triumph. There was also, though you could
not see it, a chicken dinner in Toto's interior, by way of further
celebration.

And was it true that Mr. Fillmore had bought the piece? A great man, was
Mrs. Meecher's verdict. Mr. Faucitt had always said so...

“Oh, how is Mr. Faucitt?” Sally asked, reproaching herself for having
allowed the pressure of other matters to drive all thoughts of her late
patient from her mind.

“He's gone,” said Mrs. Meecher with such relish that to Sally, in her
morbid condition, the words had only one meaning. She turned white and
clutched at the banisters.

“Gone!”

“To England,” added Mrs. Meecher. Sally was vastly relieved.

“Oh, I thought you meant...”

“Oh no, not that.” Mrs. Meecher sighed, for she had been a little
disappointed in the old gentleman, who started out as such a promising
invalid, only to fall away into the dullness of robust health once more.
“He's well enough. I never seen anybody better. You'd think,” said Mrs.
Meecher, bearing up with difficulty under her grievance, “you'd think this
here new Spanish influenza was a sort of a tonic or somep'n, the way he
looks now. Of course,” she added, trying to find justification for a
respected lodger, “he's had good news. His brother's dead.”

“What!”

“Not, I don't mean, that that was good news, far from it, though, come to
think of it, all flesh is as grass and we all got to be prepared for
somep'n of the sort breaking loose...but it seems this here new brother of
his—I didn't know he'd a brother, and I don't suppose you knew he
had a brother. Men are secretive, ain't they!—this brother of his
has left him a parcel of money, and Mr. Faucitt he had to get on the
Wednesday boat quick as he could and go right over to the other side to
look after things. Wind up the estate, I believe they call it. Left in a
awful hurry, he did. Sent his love to you and said he'd write. Funny him
having a brother, now, wasn't it? Not,” said Mrs. Meecher, at heart a
reasonable woman, “that folks don't have brothers. I got two myself, one
in Portland, Oregon, and the other goodness knows where he is. But what
I'm trying to say...”

Sally disengaged herself, and went up to her room. For a brief while the
excitement which comes of hearing good news about those of whom we are
fond acted as a stimulant, and she felt almost cheerful. Dear old Mr.
Faucitt. She was sorry for his brother, of course, though she had never
had the pleasure of his acquaintance and had only just heard that he had
ever existed; but it was nice to think that her old friend's remaining
years would be years of affluence.

Presently, however, she found her thoughts wandering back into their
melancholy groove. She threw herself wearily on the bed. She was tired
after her bad night.

But she could not sleep. Remorse kept her awake. Besides, she could hear
Mrs. Meecher prowling disturbingly about the house, apparently in search
of someone, her progress indicated by creaking boards and the strenuous
yapping of Toto.

Sally turned restlessly, and, having turned remained for a long instant
transfixed and rigid. She had seen something, and what she had seen was
enough to surprise any girl in the privacy of her bedroom. From underneath
the bed there peeped coyly forth an undeniably masculine shoe and six
inches of a grey trouser-leg.

Sally bounded to the floor. She was a girl of courage, and she meant to
probe this matter thoroughly.

“What are you doing under my bed?”

The question was a reasonable one, and evidently seemed to the intruder to
deserve an answer. There was a muffled sneeze, and he began to crawl out.

The shoe came first. Then the legs. Then a sturdy body in a dusty coat.
And finally there flashed on Sally's fascinated gaze a head of so nearly
the maximum redness that it could only belong to one person in the world.

“Ginger!”

Mr. Lancelot Kemp, on all fours, blinked up at her.

“Oh, hullo!” he said.

CHAPTER IX. GINGER BECOMES A RIGHT-HAND MAN

It was not till she saw him actually standing there before her with his
hair rumpled and a large smut on the tip of his nose, that Sally really
understood how profoundly troubled she had been about this young man, and
how vivid had been that vision of him bobbing about on the waters of the
Thames, a cold and unappreciated corpse. She was a girl of keen
imagination, and she had allowed her imagination to riot unchecked.
Astonishment, therefore, at the extraordinary fact of his being there was
for the moment thrust aside by relief. Never before in her life had she
experienced such an overwhelming rush of exhilaration. She flung herself
into a chair and burst into a screech of laughter which even to her own
ears sounded strange. It struck Ginger as hysterical.

“I say, you know!” said Ginger, as the merriment showed no signs of
abating. Ginger was concerned. Nasty shock for a girl, finding blighters
under her bed.

Sally sat up, gurgling, and wiped her eyes.

“Oh, I am glad to see you,” she gasped.

“No, really?” said Ginger, gratified. “That's fine.” It occurred to him
that some sort of apology would be a graceful act. “I say, you know,
awfully sorry. About barging in here, I mean. Never dreamed it was your
room. Unoccupied, I thought.”

“Don't mention it. I ought not to have disturbed you. You were having a
nice sleep, of course. Do you always sleep on the floor?”

“It was like this...”

“Of course, if you're wearing it for ornament, as a sort of beauty-spot,”
said Sally, “all right. But in case you don't know, you've a smut on your
nose.”

“Oh, my aunt! Not really?”

“Now would I deceive you on an important point like that?”

“Do you mind if I have a look in the glass?”

“Certainly, if you can stand it.”

Ginger moved hurriedly to the dressing-table.

“You're perfectly right,” he announced, applying his handkerchief.

“I thought I was. I'm very quick at noticing things.”

“My hair's a bit rumpled, too.”

“Very much so.”

“You take my tip,” said Ginger, earnestly, “and never lie about under
beds. There's nothing in it.”

“That reminds me. You won't be offended if I asked you something?”

“No, no. Go ahead.”

“It's rather an impertinent question. You may resent it.”

“No, no.”

“Well, then, what were you doing under my bed?”

“Oh, under your bed?”

“Yes. Under my bed. This. It's a bed, you know. Mine. My bed. You were
under it. Why? Or putting it another way, why were you under my bed?”

“I was hiding.”

“Playing hide-and-seek? That explains it.”

“Mrs. What's-her-name—Beecher—Meecher—was after me.”

Sally shook her head disapprovingly.

“You mustn't encourage Mrs. Meecher in these childish pastimes. It
unsettles her.”

Ginger passed an agitated hand over his forehead.

“It's like this...”

“I hate to keep criticizing your appearance,” said Sally, “and personally
I like it; but, when you clutched your brow just then, you put about a
pound of dust on it. Your hands are probably grubby.”

Ginger inspected them.

“They are!”

“Why not make a really good job of it and have a wash?”

“Do you mind?”

“I'd prefer it.”

“Thanks awfully. I mean to say it's your basin, you know, and all that.
What I mean is, seem to be making myself pretty well at home.”

“Oh, no.”

“Touching the matter of soap...”

“Use mine. We Americans are famous for our hospitality.”

“Thanks awfully.”

“The towel is on your right.”

“Thanks awfully.”

“And I've a clothes brush in my bag.”

“Thanks awfully.”

Splashing followed like a sea-lion taking a dip. “Now, then,” said Sally,
“why were you hiding from Mrs. Meecher?”

A careworn, almost hunted look came into Ginger's face. “I say, you know,
that woman is rather by way of being one of the lads, what! Scares me!
Word was brought that she was on the prowl, so it seemed to me a judicious
move to take cover till she sort of blew over. If she'd found me, she'd
have made me take that dog of hers for a walk.”

“Toto?”

“Toto. You know,” said Ginger, with a strong sense of injury, “no dog's
got a right to be a dog like that. I don't suppose there's anyone keener
on dogs than I am, but a thing like a woolly rat.” He shuddered slightly.
“Well, one hates to be seen about with it in the public streets.”

“Why couldn't you have refused in a firm but gentlemanly manner to take
Toto out?”

“Ah! There you rather touch the spot. You see, the fact of the matter is,
I'm a bit behind with the rent, and that makes it rather hard to take what
you might call a firm stand.”

“But how can you be behind with the rent? I only left here the Saturday
before last and you weren't in the place then. You can't have been here
more than a week.”

“I've been here just a week. That's the week I'm behind with.”

“But why? You were a millionaire when I left you at Roville.”

“Well, the fact of the matter is, I went back to the tables that night and
lost a goodish bit of what I'd won. And, somehow or another, when I got to
America, the stuff seemed to slip away.”

“What made you come to America at all?” said Sally, asking the question
which, she felt, any sensible person would have asked at the opening of
the conversation.

One of his familiar blushes raced over Ginger's face. “Oh, I thought I
would. Land of opportunity, you know.”

“Have you managed to find any of the opportunities yet?”

“Well, I have got a job of sorts, I'm a waiter at a rummy little place on
Second Avenue. The salary isn't big, but I'd have wangled enough out of it
to pay last week's rent, only they docked me a goodish bit for breaking
plates and what not. The fact is, I'm making rather a hash of it.”

“Oh, Ginger! You oughtn't to be a waiter!”

“That's what the boss seems to think.”

“I mean, you ought to be doing something ever so much better.”

“But what? You've no notion how well all these blighters here seem to be
able to get along without my help. I've tramped all over the place,
offering my services, but they all say they'll try to carry on as they
are.”

Sally reflected.

“I know!”

“What?”

“I'll make Fillmore give you a job. I wonder I didn't think of it before.”

“Fillmore?”

“My brother. Yes, he'll be able to use you.”

“What as?”

Sally considered.

“As a—as a—oh, as his right-hand man.”

“Does he want a right-hand man?”

“Sure to. He's a young fellow trying to get along. Sure to want a
right-hand man.”

“'M yes,” said Ginger reflectively. “Of course, I've never been a
right-hand man, you know.”

“Oh, you'd pick it up. I'll take you round to him now. He's staying at the
Astor.”

“There's just one thing,” said Ginger.

“What's that?”

“I might make a hash of it.”

“Heavens, Ginger! There must be something in this world that you wouldn't
make a hash of. Don't stand arguing any longer. Are you dry? and clean?
Very well, then. Let's be off.”

“Right ho.”

Ginger took a step towards the door, then paused, rigid, with one leg in
the air, as though some spell had been cast upon him. From the passage
outside there had sounded a shrill yapping. Ginger looked at Sally. Then
he looked—longingly—at the bed.

“Don't be such a coward,” said Sally, severely.

“Yes, but...”

“How much do you owe Mrs. Meecher?”

“Round about twelve dollars, I think it is.”

“I'll pay her.”

Ginger flushed awkwardly.

“No, I'm hanged if you will! I mean,” he stammered, “it's frightfully good
of you and all that, and I can't tell you how grateful I am, but honestly,
I couldn't...”

Sally did not press the point. She liked him the better for a rugged
independence, which in the days of his impecuniousness her brother
Fillmore had never dreamed of exhibiting.

“Very well,” she said. “Have it your own way. Proud. That's me all over,
Mabel. Ginger!” She broke off sharply. “Pull yourself together. Where is
your manly spirit? I'd be ashamed to be such a coward.”

“Awfully sorry, but, honestly, that woolly dog...”

“Never mind the dog. I'll see you through.”

They came out into the passage almost on top of Toto, who was stalking
phantom rats. Mrs. Meecher was manoeuvring in the background. Her face lit
up grimly at the sight of Ginger.

“Mister Kemp! I been looking for you.”

Sally intervened brightly.

“Oh, Mrs. Meecher,” she said, shepherding her young charge through the
danger zone, “I was so surprised to meet Mr. Kemp here. He is a great
friend of mine. We met in France. We're going off now to have a long talk
about old times, and then I'm taking him to see my brother...”

“Toto...”

“Dear little thing! You ought to take him for a walk,” said Sally. “It's a
lovely day. Mr. Kemp was saying just now that he would have liked to take
him, but we're rather in a hurry and shall probably have to get into a
taxi. You've no idea how busy my brother is just now. If we're late, he'll
never forgive us.”

She passed on down the stairs, leaving Mrs. Meecher dissatisfied but
irresolute. There was something about Sally which even in her pre-wealthy
days had always baffled Mrs. Meecher and cramped her style, and now that
she was rich and independent she inspired in the chatelaine of the
boarding-house an emotion which was almost awe. The front door had closed
before Mrs. Meecher had collected her faculties; and Ginger, pausing on
the sidewalk, drew a long breath.

“You know, you're wonderful!” he said, regarding Sally with unconcealed
admiration.

She accepted the compliment composedly.

“Now we'll go and hunt up Fillmore,” she said. “But there's no need to
hurry, of course, really. We'll go for a walk first, and then call at the
Astor and make him give us lunch. I want to hear all about you. I've heard
something already. I met your cousin, Mr. Carmyle. He was on the train
coming from Detroit. Did you know that he was in America?”

“No, I've—er—rather lost touch with the Family.”

“So I gathered from Mr. Carmyle. And I feel hideously responsible. It was
all through me that all this happened.”

“Oh, no.”

“Of course it was. I made you what you are to-day—I hope I'm
satisfied—I dragged and dragged you down until the soul within you
died, so to speak. I know perfectly well that you wouldn't have dreamed of
savaging the Family as you seem to have done if it hadn't been for what I
said to you at Roville. Ginger, tell me, what did happen? I'm dying to
know. Mr. Carmyle said you insulted your uncle!”

“Donald. Yes, we did have a bit of a scrap, as a matter of fact. He made
me go out to dinner with him and we—er—sort of disagreed. To
start with, he wanted me to apologize to old Scrymgeour, and I rather gave
it a miss.”

“Noble fellow!”

“Scrymgeour?”

“No, silly! You.”

“Oh, ah!” Ginger blushed. “And then there was all that about the soup, you
know.”

“How do you mean, 'all that about the soup'? What about the soup? What
soup?”

“Well, things sort of hotted up a bit when the soup arrived.”

“I don't understand.”

“I mean, the trouble seemed to start, as it were, when the waiter had
finished ladling out the mulligatawny. Thick soup, you know.”

“I know mulligatawny is a thick soup. Yes?”

“Well, my old uncle—I'm not blaming him, don't you know—more
his misfortune than his fault—I can see that now—but he's got
a heavy moustache. Like a walrus, rather, and he's a bit apt to inhale the
stuff through it. And I—well, I asked him not to. It was just a
suggestion, you know. He cut up fairly rough, and by the time the fish
came round we were more or less down on the mat chewing holes in one
another. My fault, probably. I wasn't feeling particularly well-disposed
towards the Family that night. I'd just had a talk with Bruce—my
cousin, you know—in Piccadilly, and that had rather got the wind up
me. Bruce always seems to get on my nerves a bit somehow and—Uncle
Donald asking me to dinner and all that. By the way, did you get the
books?”

“What books?”

“Bruce said he wanted to send you some books. That was why I gave him your
address.” Sally stared.

“He never sent me any books.”

“Well, he said he was going to, and I had to tell him where to send them.”

Sally walked on, a little thoughtfully. She was not a vain girl, but it
was impossible not to perceive in the light of this fresh evidence that
Mr. Carmyle had made a journey of three thousand miles with the sole
object of renewing his acquaintance with her. It did not matter, of
course, but it was vaguely disturbing. No girl cares to be dogged by a man
she rather dislikes.

“Go on telling me about your uncle,” she said.

“Well, there's not much more to tell. I'd happened to get that wireless of
yours just before I started out to dinner with him, and I was more or less
feeling that I wasn't going to stand any rot from the Family. I'd got to
the fish course, hadn't I? Well, we managed to get through that somehow,
but we didn't survive the fillet steak. One thing seemed to lead to
another, and the show sort of bust up. He called me a good many things,
and I got a bit fed-up, and finally I told him I hadn't any more use for
the Family and was going to start out on my own. And—well, I did,
don't you know. And here I am.”

Sally listened to this saga breathlessly. More than ever did she feel
responsible for her young protégé, and any faint qualms which she had
entertained as to the wisdom of transferring practically the whole of her
patrimony to the care of so erratic a financier as her brother vanished.
It was her plain duty to see that Ginger was started well in the race of
life, and Fillmore was going to come in uncommonly handy.

“We'll go to the Astor now,” she said, “and I'll introduce you to
Fillmore. He's a theatrical manager and he's sure to have something for
you.”

“It's awfully good of you to bother about me.”

“Ginger,” said Sally, “I regard you as a grandson. Hail that cab, will
you?”

CHAPTER X. SALLY IN THE SHADOWS

1

It seemed to Sally in the weeks that followed her reunion with Ginger Kemp
that a sort of golden age had set in. On all the frontiers of her little
kingdom there was peace and prosperity, and she woke each morning in a
world so neatly smoothed and ironed out that the most captious pessimist
could hardly have found anything in it to criticize.

True, Gerald was still a thousand miles away. Going to Chicago to
superintend the opening of “The Primrose Way”; for Fillmore had acceded to
his friend Ike's suggestion in the matter of producing it first in
Chicago, and he had been called in by a distracted manager to revise the
work of a brother dramatist, whose comedy was in difficulties at one of
the theatres in that city; and this meant he would have to remain on the
spot for some time to come. It was disappointing, for Sally had been
looking forward to having him back in New York in a few days; but she
refused to allow herself to be depressed. Life as a whole was much too
satisfactory for that. Life indeed, in every other respect, seemed
perfect. Fillmore was going strong; Ginger was off her conscience; she had
found an apartment; her new hat suited her; and “The Primrose Way” was a
tremendous success. Chicago, it appeared from Fillmore's account, was
paying little attention to anything except “The Primrose Way.” National
problems had ceased to interest the citizens. Local problems left them
cold. Their minds were riveted to the exclusion of all else on the problem
of how to secure seats. The production of the piece, according to
Fillmore, had been the most terrific experience that had come to stir
Chicago since the great fire.

Of all these satisfactory happenings, the most satisfactory, to Sally's
thinking, was the fact that the problem of Ginger's future had been
solved. Ginger had entered the service of the Fillmore Nicholas Theatrical
Enterprises Ltd. (Managing Director, Fillmore Nicholas)—Fillmore
would have made the title longer, only that was all that would go on the
brass plate—and was to be found daily in the outer office, his
duties consisting mainly, it seemed, in reading the evening papers. What
exactly he was, even Ginger hardly knew. Sometimes he felt like the man at
the wheel, sometimes like a glorified office boy, and not so very
glorified at that. For the most part he had to prevent the mob rushing and
getting at Fillmore, who sat in semi-regal state in the inner office
pondering great schemes.

But, though there might be an occasional passing uncertainty in Ginger's
mind as to just what he was supposed to be doing in exchange for the fifty
dollars he drew every Friday, there was nothing uncertain about his
gratitude to Sally for having pulled the strings and enabled him to do it.
He tried to thank her every time they met, and nowadays they were meeting
frequently; for Ginger was helping her to furnish her new apartment. In
this task, he spared no efforts. He said that it kept him in condition.

“And what I mean to say is,” said Ginger, pausing in the act of carrying a
massive easy chair to the third spot which Sally had selected in the last
ten minutes, “if I didn't sweat about a bit and help you after the way you
got me that job...”

“Ginger, desist,” said Sally.

“Yes, but honestly...”

“If you don't stop it, I'll make you move that chair into the next room.”

“Shall I?” Ginger rubbed his blistered hands and took a new grip.
“Anything you say.”

“Silly! Of course not. The only other rooms are my bedroom, the bathroom
and the kitchen. What on earth would I want a great lumbering chair in
them for? All the same, I believe the first we chose was the best.”

“Back she goes, then, what?”

Sally reflected frowningly. This business of setting up house was causing
her much thought.

“No,” she decided. “By the window is better.” She looked at him
remorsefully. “I'm giving you a lot of trouble.”

“Trouble!” Ginger, accompanied by a chair, staggered across the room. “The
way I look at it is this.” He wiped a bead of perspiration from his
freckled forehead. “You got me that job, and...”

“Stop!”

“Right ho... Still, you did, you know.”

Sally sat down in the armchair and stretched herself. Watching Ginger work
had given her a vicarious fatigue. She surveyed the room proudly. It was
certainly beginning to look cosy. The pictures were up, the carpet down,
the furniture very neatly in order. For almost the first time in her life
she had the restful sensation of being at home. She had always longed,
during the past three years of boarding-house existence, for a settled
abode, a place where she could lock the door on herself and be alone. The
apartment was small, but it was undeniably a haven. She looked about her
and could see no flaw in it... except... She had a sudden sense of
something missing.

“Hullo!” she said. “Where's that photograph of me? I'm sure I put it on
the mantelpiece yesterday.”

His exertions seemed to have brought the blood to Ginger's face. He was a
rich red. He inspected the mantelpiece narrowly.

“No. No photograph here.”

“I know there isn't. But it was there yesterday. Or was it? I know I meant
to put it there. Perhaps I forgot. It's the most beautiful thing you ever
saw. Not a bit like me; but what of that? They touch 'em up in the
dark-room, you know. I value it because it looks the way I should like to
look if I could.”

“I've never had a beautiful photograph taken of myself,” said Ginger,
solemnly, with gentle regret.

“Cheer up!”

“Oh, I don't mind. I only mentioned...”

“Ginger,” said Sally, “pardon my interrupting your remarks, which I know
are valuable, but this chair is—not—right! It ought to be
where it was at the beginning. Could you give your imitation of a
pack-mule just once more? And after that I'll make you some tea. If
there's any tea—or milk—or cups.”

“There are cups all right. I know, because I smashed two the day before
yesterday. I'll nip round the corner for some milk, shall I?”

“Yes, please nip. All this hard work has taken it out of me terribly.”

Over the tea-table Sally became inquisitive.

“What I can't understand about this job of yours. Ginger—which as
you are just about to observe, I was noble enough to secure for you—is
the amount of leisure that seems to go with it. How is it that you are
able to spend your valuable time—Fillmore's valuable time, rather—juggling
with my furniture every day?”

“Oh, I can usually get off.”

“But oughtn't you to be at your post doing—whatever it is you do?
What do you do?”

Ginger stirred his tea thoughtfully and gave his mind to the question.

“Well, I sort of mess about, you know.” He pondered. “I interview divers
blighters and tell 'em your brother is out and take their names and
addresses and... oh, all that sort of thing.”

“Does Fillmore consult you much?”

“He lets me read some of the plays that are sent in. Awful tosh most of
them. Sometimes he sends me off to a vaudeville house of an evening.”

“As a treat?”

“To see some special act, you know. To report on it. In case he might want
to use it for this revue of his.”

“Which revue?”

“Didn't you know he was going to put on a revue? Oh, rather. A whacking
big affair. Going to cut out the Follies and all that sort of thing.”

“But—my goodness!” Sally was alarmed. It was just like Fillmore, she
felt, to go branching out into these expensive schemes when he ought to be
moving warily and trying to consolidate the small success he had had. All
his life he had thought in millions where the prudent man would have been
content with hundreds. An inexhaustible fount of optimism bubbled
eternally within him. “That's rather ambitious,” she said.

“Yes. Ambitious sort of cove, your brother. Quite the Napoleon.”

“I shall have to talk to him,” said Sally decidedly. She was annoyed with
Fillmore. Everything had been going so beautifully, with everybody
peaceful and happy and prosperous and no anxiety anywhere, till he had
spoiled things. Now she would have to start worrying again.

“Of course,” argued Ginger, “there's money in revues. Over in London
fellows make pots out of them.”

Sally shook her head.

“It won't do,” she said. “And I'll tell you another thing that won't do.
This armchair. Of course it ought to be over by the window. You can see
that yourself, can't you.”

“Absolutely!” said Ginger, patiently preparing for action once more.

2

Sally's anxiety with regard to her ebullient brother was not lessened by
the receipt shortly afterwards of a telegram from Miss Winch in Chicago.

Have you been feeding Fillmore meat?

the telegram ran: and, while Sally could not have claimed that she
completely understood it, there was a sinister suggestion about the
message which decided her to wait no longer before making investigations.
She tore herself away from the joys of furnishing and went round to the
headquarters of the Fillmore Nicholas Theatrical Enterprises Ltd.
(Managing Director, Fillmore Nicholas) without delay.

Ginger, she discovered on arrival, was absent from his customary post, his
place in the outer office being taken by a lad of tender years and pimply
exterior, who thawed and cast off a proud reserve on hearing Sally's name,
and told her to walk right in. Sally walked right in, and found Fillmore
with his feet on an untidy desk, studying what appeared to be
costume-designs.

“Ah, Sally!” he said in the distrait, tired voice which speaks of vast
preoccupations. Prosperity was still putting in its silent, deadly work on
the Hope of the American Theatre. What, even at as late an epoch as the
return from Detroit, had been merely a smooth fullness around the angle of
the jaw was now frankly and without disguise a double chin. He was wearing
a new waistcoat and it was unbuttoned. “I am rather busy,” he went on.
“Always glad to see you, but I am rather busy. I have a hundred things to
attend to.”

“Well, attend to me. That'll only make a hundred and one. Fill, what's all
this I hear about a revue?”

Fillmore looked as like a small boy caught in the act of stealing jam as
it is possible for a great theatrical manager to look. He had been
wondering in his darker moments what Sally would say about that project
when she heard of it, and he had hoped that she would not hear of it until
all the preparations were so complete that interference would be
impossible. He was extremely fond of Sally, but there was, he knew, a
lamentable vein of caution in her make-up which might lead her to
criticize. And how can your man of affairs carry on if women are buzzing
round criticizing all the time? He picked up a pen and put it down;
buttoned his waistcoat and unbuttoned it; and scratched his ear with one
of the costume-designs.

“Oh yes, the revue!”

“It's no good saying 'Oh yes'! You know perfectly well it's a crazy idea.”

“Really... these business matters... this interference...”

“I don't want to run your affairs for you, Fill, but that money of mine
does make me a sort of partner, I suppose, and I think I have a right to
raise a loud yell of agony when I see you risking it on a...”

“Pardon me,” said Fillmore loftily, looking happier. “Let me explain.
Women never understand business matters. Your money is tied up exclusively
in 'The Primrose Way,' which, as you know, is a tremendous success. You
have nothing whatever to worry about as regards any new production I may
make.”

“I'm not worrying about the money. I'm worrying about you.”

A tolerant smile played about the lower slopes of Fillmore's face.

“Don't be alarmed about me. I'm all right.”

“You aren't all right. You've no business, when you've only just got
started as a manager, to be rushing into an enormous production like this.
You can't afford it.”

“My dear child, as I said before, women cannot understand these things. A
man in my position can always command money for a new venture.”

“Do you mean to say you have found somebody silly enough to put up money?”

“Certainly. I don't know that there is any secret about it. Your friend,
Mr. Carmyle, has taken an interest in some of my forthcoming productions.”

“What!” Sally had been disturbed before, but she was aghast now.

This was something she had never anticipated. Bruce Carmyle seemed to be
creeping into her life like an advancing tide. There appeared to be no
eluding him. Wherever she turned, there he was, and she could do nothing
but rage impotently. The situation was becoming impossible.

Fillmore misinterpreted the note of dismay in her voice.

“It's quite all right,” he assured her. “He's a very rich man. Large
private means, besides his big income. Even if anything goes wrong...”

“It isn't that. It's...”

The hopelessness of explaining to Fillmore stopped Sally. And while she
was chafing at this new complication which had come to upset the orderly
routine of her life there was an outburst of voices in the other office.
Ginger's understudy seemed to be endeavouring to convince somebody that
the Big Chief was engaged and not to be intruded upon. In this he was
unsuccessful, for the door opened tempestuously and Miss Winch sailed in.

“Fillmore, you poor nut,” said Miss Winch, for though she might wrap up
her meaning somewhat obscurely in her telegraphic communications, when it
came to the spoken word she was directness itself, “stop picking straws in
your hair and listen to me. You're dippy!”

The last time Sally had seen Fillmore's fiancée, she had been impressed by
her imperturbable calm. Miss Winch, in Detroit, had seemed a girl whom
nothing could ruffle. That she had lapsed now from this serene placidity,
struck Sally as ominous. Slightly though she knew her, she felt that it
could be no ordinary happening that had so animated her
sister-in-law-to-be.

“Ah! Here you are!” said Fillmore. He had started to his feet indignantly
at the opening of the door, like a lion bearded in its den, but calm had
returned when he saw who the intruder was.

“Yes, here I am!” Miss Winch dropped despairingly into a swivel-chair, and
endeavoured to restore herself with a stick of chewing-gum. “Fillmore,
darling, you're the sweetest thing on earth, and I love you, but on
present form you could just walk straight into Bloomingdale and they'd
give you the royal suite.”

“My dear girl...”

“What do you think?” demanded Miss Winch, turning to Sally.

“I've just been telling him,” said Sally, welcoming this ally, “I think
it's absurd at this stage of things for him to put on an enormous
revue...”

“Revue?” Miss Winch stopped in the act of gnawing her gum. “What revue?”
She flung up her arms. “I shall have to swallow this gum,” she said. “You
can't chew with your head going round. Are you putting on a revue too?”

Fillmore was buttoning and unbuttoning his waistcoat. He had a hounded
look.

“Certainly, certainly,” he replied in a tone of some feverishness. “I wish
you girls would leave me to manage...”

“Dippy!” said Miss Winch once more. “Telegraphic address: Tea-Pot,
Matteawan.” She swivelled round to Sally again. “Say, listen! This boy
must be stopped. We must form a gang in his best interests and get him put
away. What do you think he proposes doing? I'll give you three guesses.
Oh, what's the use? You'd never hit it. This poor wandering lad has got it
all fixed up to star me—me—in a new show!”

Fillmore removed a hand from his waistcoat buttons and waved it
protestingly.

“I have used my own judgment...”

“Yes, sir!” proceeded Miss Winch, riding over the interruption. “That's
what he's planning to spring on an unsuspicious public. I'm sitting
peacefully in my room at the hotel in Chicago, pronging a few cents' worth
of scrambled eggs and reading the morning paper, when the telephone rings.
Gentleman below would like to see me. Oh, ask him to wait. Business of
flinging on a few clothes. Down in elevator. Bright sunrise effects in
lobby.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“The gentleman had a head of red hair which had to be seen to be
believed,” explained Miss Winch. “Lit up the lobby. Management had
switched off all the electrics for sake of economy. An Englishman he was.
Nice fellow. Named Kemp.”

“Oh, is Ginger in Chicago?” said Sally. “I wondered why he wasn't on his
little chair in the outer office.

“I sent Kemp to Chicago,” said Fillmore, “to have a look at the show. It
is my policy, if I am unable to pay periodical visits myself, to send a
representative...”

“Save it up for the long winter evenings,” advised Miss Winch, cutting in
on this statement of managerial tactics. “Mr. Kemp may have been there to
look at the show, but his chief reason for coming was to tell me to beat
it back to New York to enter into my kingdom. Fillmore wanted me on the
spot, he told me, so that I could sit around in this office here,
interviewing my supporting company. Me! Can you or can you not,” inquired
Miss Winch frankly, “tie it?”

“Well...” Sally hesitated.

“Don't say it! I know it just as well as you do. It's too sad for words.”

“You persist in underestimating your abilities, Gladys,” said Fillmore
reproachfully. “I have had a certain amount of experience in theatrical
matters—I have seen a good deal of acting—and I assure you
that as a character-actress you...”

Miss Winch rose swiftly from her seat, kissed Fillmore energetically, and
sat down again. She produced another stick of chewing-gum, then shook her
head and replaced it in her bag.

“You're a darling old thing to talk like that,” she said, “and I hate to
wake you out of your daydreams, but, honestly, Fillmore, dear, do just
step out of the padded cell for one moment and listen to reason. I know
exactly what has been passing in your poor disordered bean. You took Elsa
Doland out of a minor part and made her a star overnight. She goes to
Chicago, and the critics and everybody else rave about her. As a matter of
fact,” she said to Sally with enthusiasm, for hers was an honest and
generous nature, “you can't realize, not having seen her play there, what
an amazing hit she has made. She really is a sensation. Everybody says
she's going to be the biggest thing on record. Very well, then, what does
Fillmore do? The poor fish claps his hand to his forehead and cries
'Gadzooks! An idea! I've done it before, I'll do it again. I'm the fellow
who can make a star out of anything.' And he picks on me!”

“My dear girl...”

“Now, the flaw in the scheme is this. Elsa is a genius, and if he hadn't
made her a star somebody else would have done. But little Gladys? That's
something else again.” She turned to Sally. “You've seen me in action, and
let me tell you you've seen me at my best. Give me a maid's part, with a
tray to carry on in act one and a couple of 'Yes, madam's' in act two, and
I'm there! Ellen Terry hasn't anything on me when it comes to saying 'Yes,
madam,' and I'm willing to back myself for gold, notes, or lima beans
against Sarah Bernhardt as a tray-carrier. But there I finish. That lets
me out. And anybody who thinks otherwise is going to lose a lot of money.
Between ourselves the only thing I can do really well is to cook...”

“My dear Gladys!” cried Fillmore revolted.

“I'm a heaven-born cook, and I don't mind notifying the world to that
effect. I can cook a chicken casserole so that you would leave home and
mother for it. Also my English pork-pies! One of these days I'll take an
afternoon off and assemble one for you. You'd be surprised! But acting—no.
I can't do it, and I don't want to do it. I only went on the stage for
fun, and my idea of fun isn't to plough through a star part with all the
critics waving their axes in the front row, and me knowing all the time
that it's taking money out of Fillmore's bankroll that ought to be going
towards buying the little home with stationary wash-tubs... Well, that's
that, Fillmore, old darling. I thought I'd just mention it.”

Sally could not help being sorry for Fillmore. He was sitting with his
chin on his hands, staring moodily before him—Napoleon at Elba. It
was plain that this project of taking Miss Winch by the scruff of the neck
and hurling her to the heights had been very near his heart.

“If that's how you feel,” he said in a stricken voice, “there is nothing
more to say.”

“Oh, yes there is. We will now talk about this revue of yours. It's off!”

Fillmore bounded to his feet; he thumped the desk with a well-nourished
fist. A man can stand just so much.

“It is not off! Great heavens! It's too much! I will not put up with this
interference with my business concerns. I will not be tied and hampered.
Here am I, a man of broad vision and... and... broad vision... I form my
plans... my plans... I form them... I shape my schemes... and what
happens? A horde of girls flock into my private office while I am
endeavouring to concentrate... and concentrate... I won't stand it.
Advice, yes. Interference, no. I... I... I... and kindly remember that!”

The door closed with a bang. A fainter detonation announced the whirlwind
passage through the outer office. Footsteps died away down the corridor.

Sally looked at Miss Winch, stunned. A roused and militant Fillmore was
new to her.

Miss Winch took out the stick of chewing-gum again and unwrapped it.

“Isn't he cute!” she said. “I hope he doesn't get the soft kind,” she
murmured, chewing reflectively.

“The soft kind.”

“He'll be back soon with a box of candy,” explained Miss Winch, “and he
will get that sloshy, creamy sort, though I keep telling him I like the
other. Well, one thing's certain. Fillmore's got it up his nose. He's
beginning to hop about and sing in the sunlight. It's going to be hard
work to get that boy down to earth again.” Miss Winch heaved a gentle
sigh. “I should like him to have enough left in the old stocking to pay
the first year's rent when the wedding bells ring out.” She bit
meditatively on her chewing-gum. “Not,” she said, “that it matters. I'd be
just as happy in two rooms and a kitchenette, so long as Fillmore was
there. You've no notion how dippy I am about him.” Her freckled face
glowed. “He grows on me like a darned drug. And the funny thing is that I
keep right on admiring him though I can see all the while that he's the
most perfect chump. He is a chump, you know. That's what I love about him.
That and the way his ears wiggle when he gets excited. Chumps always make
the best husbands. When you marry, Sally, grab a chump. Tap his forehead
first, and if it rings solid, don't hesitate. All the unhappy marriages
come from the husband having brains. What good are brains to a man? They
only unsettle him.” She broke off and scrutinized Sally closely. “Say,
what do you do with your skin?”

She spoke with solemn earnestness which made Sally laugh.

“What do I do with my skin? I just carry it around with me.”

“Well,” said Miss Winch enviously, “I wish I could train my darned fool of
a complexion to get that way. Freckles are the devil. When I was eight I
had the finest collection in the Middle West, and I've been adding to it
right along. Some folks say lemon-juice'll cure 'em. Mine lap up all I
give 'em and ask for more. There's only one way of getting rid of
freckles, and that is to saw the head off at the neck.”

“But why do you want to get rid of them?”

“Why? Because a sensitive girl, anxious to retain her future husband's
love, doesn't enjoy going about looking like something out of a dime
museum.”

“How absurd! Fillmore worships freckles.”

“Did he tell you so?” asked Miss Winch eagerly.

“Not in so many words, but you can see it in his eye.”

“Well, he certainly asked me to marry him, knowing all about them, I will
say that. And, what's more, I don't think feminine loveliness means much
to Fillmore, or he'd never have picked on me. Still, it is calculated to
give a girl a jar, you must admit, when she picks up a magazine and reads
an advertisement of a face-cream beginning, 'Your husband is growing cold
to you. Can you blame him? Have you really tried to cure those unsightly
blemishes?'—meaning what I've got. Still, I haven't noticed Fillmore
growing cold to me, so maybe it's all right.”