Joan Thursday: A Novel

For several days the girl had haunted the stairs, the hall, and door-step, alert to waylay Matthias, before suddenly she became aware that it was long since she had either caught a glimpse of him or heard the syncopated murmuring of the typewriter behind the closed door to his back-parlour.

It required the lapse of another day or two before she found courage to question (with laboured indifference) the dilapidated chambermaid who sedulously neglected her room for lack of a tip. From this far from garrulous source she learned that Matthias had packed up and gone out of town very suddenly, without mentioning where he might be addressed during his absence.

Alone at the window of her tiny cell, Joan stared down at the uninspiring vista of back-yards and disconsolately recapitulated her sorry fortunes.

She was now close upon the end of the fortnight's residence in the hall bedroom; before long she would have to surrender another four dollars—a week's rent in advance. Of the twenty-two dollars she had received from Butch, eight remained in her purse. By dint of adhering to a diet largely vegetarian, she had managed without serious discomfort to keep within an expenditure of four dollars per week for food. And twice Maizie Dean had saved her the cost of an evening meal by inviting her to dine out—at the expense of friends in "the profession." But a continuance of such favours was not to be counted upon; and the problem of living a fourth week away from home was one serious and importunate—always assuming she should fail to secure work before her money ran out. She had no resources in any degree dependable: Butch, even if willing, would probably not be able to extend her another loan; she possessed nothing worth pawning; and Maizie Dean had taken prompt occasion to make it clear that, while she was willing to do anything inexpensive for a budding sister artiste, her tolerance would stop short of financial aid.

"Take it from me, dear," she announced soon after their first meeting: "there ain't no people in the world quicker to slip you a live tip than folks in the business; but you gotta make up your mind to pay your own keep. They work too hard for their coin to give up any without a howl you could hear from here to Hollum; and anyway, everybody's always broke in the summer. If you don't land somewhere before your cash runs low, you might just's well make up your mind to slip back into the chain-gang behind the counter."

She had developed—or changed—amazingly in the brief period of her public career. Joan experienced difficulty in recognizing in her the warm-hearted Irish girl who had initiated her into the duties of saleswoman in the stocking department. She had hardened more than superficially; she was now as artificial as her make-up, as the hue of her ashen hair. The world to her was a desert threaded by "circuits," life an arid waste of "open time" punctuated with oases of "booking"; and the fountainhead of temporal power was located in the innermost sanctum of the United Booking Offices.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, she crossed her knees frankly, sucked thoughtfully at a cigarette, and waved an explanatory hand:

"Here's me and Mame, thinking we was all fixed for the nex' six weeks, and then somethin' puts a crimp into our bookin' and we're out for Gawd knows how long—till next Fall, sure. That's unless we want to take a trip over the meal-ticket circuit—fillin' in between filums, yunno. And if we do that it's goin' to crab us with the Orpheum people, sure; we'd never get back into the real money class. So we gotta hold onto what little we got until we kin see more time headed our way...."

On the other hand, she had been liberal with sage and trustworthy counsel as to the best way to go about "breaking into the game." It was thanks to her that Joan was now able to enter a theatrical employment agency without fear and trembling, and to back her application for chorus work with a glib and unblushing statement that she had had experience "in summer stock out on the Coast." And to the Sisters Dean, likewise, Joan owed her growing acquaintance with the intricate geography of the theatrical districts of New York, her ability to discriminate between players "resting" and the average run of Broadway loungers who cluttered the shady side of that thoroughfare, from Twenty-fifth Street north to Forty-seventh, those shimmering summer afternoons, and her slowly widening circle of nodding acquaintances among the lesser peoples of the vaudeville world.

As a rule she was awake before anybody else in the establishment of Madame Duprat; not yet could she slough the habit of early rising. Her breakfast she was accustomed to get at the same dairy restaurant which had supplied her first meal away from home, and at the same moderate expense—ten cents. By ten o'clock she would be on Broadway, beginning her round of the agencies: a courageous, shabby figure in the withering sun-blast, patient and indomitable through long hours of waiting in crowded anterooms, undiscouraged by the brevity and fruitlessness of the interviews with which her persistence was sometimes rewarded, ignoring disappointment with the same studied calm with which she had long since learned to ignore the advances of loafers of the streets.

Her lunches she would purchase wherever she might happen to be at the noon hour—or go without. By five o'clock at the latest—frequently much earlier—she would turn back to West Forty-fifth Street. For dinner she sought again the establishment that provided her breakfast. Her idle hours, both day and evening, she grew accustomed to waste in the double bedroom ("second floor front") occupied by the Dancing Deans.

At such times the soi-disant sisters were rarely without company. They were lively and agreeable creatures, by no means unattractive, and so thoroughly theatric in every effect of manner, speech, gesture, person, and thought, that the most case-hardened member of the profession could not but feel at home in their company. Consequently, they were popular with both sexes of their associates. Seldom did a day pass but they entertained several callers, with all of whom they seemed to be on terms of the most candid intimacy.

So Joan grew accustomed to being hailed, whenever she opened the door of the sisters' room, with a formula that varied little with repetition:

"Why, if it ain't the kid! Hello, dearie—come right in and stop awhile. Say, lis'n: I want you to shake hands with my friend, Charlie Quard. I guess you know who Charlie is, all right; you must of seen him of'n—played leading juveniles with the Spangler Stock, I dunno how long. Charlie, this is my little friend, Miss Thursday."

"In the business, I trust?"

"Goin' to be before long. Just lookin' round."

"Well, I wish you luck, Miss Thursday. This is the rottenest season I ever struck. There's eighty people for every job that blooms. Why, yunno, Maizie, I was talking only yesterday to Percy Williams, and Percy said—"

At about this point Joan would ordinarily be forgotten, and the gossip would rattle on through a stifling cloud of cigarette smoke, while she sat and listened with grave, if not always comprehending, attention.

And in this manner she met and grew familiar with the personalities of an astonishing crew of minor vaudeville folk, jugglers, dancers, patter comedians, balladists, coon shouters, performers on weird musical instruments, monologists, and an unclassified host of others, including a liberal sprinkling of plain actors and actresses, the pendulums of whose life alternated between small parts in popular-price stock companies and smaller parts in so-called dramatic sketches presented in vaudeville houses.

To them all (if they remembered her at all) she was Joan Thursday. The translation from Thursby had been almost inevitable. Thursday was by far the easier word to remember; Joan soon grew tired of correcting the friends of the Dancing Deans; and accepted the change the more readily since it provided her with a real "stage name", and so, in some measure, identified her with the business to which her every aspiration was devoted.

Of all the population of this new world, perhaps the most prominent in her eyes, aside from the saltatory sisters, was Mr. Quard; or, to give him the fullest benefit of the printed cards which (detaching them dexterously from the perforated edges by which they were held in an imitation-leather cover) he distributed regardless of expense:

He was a long, rangy animal, robustious, romantical; with a taste in the question of personal decoration that created compelling effects. His face was large, open, boldly featured, his smile genial, his laugh constant and unctuous. Something less than thirty, he had been on the stage since childhood; with the training of an actor of the old school, he combined immense vitality, an ample, dashing air, enviable self-sufficiency, the temperament of a tom-cat.

Any competent stage-director could have made much of him; but in an age when managers cast their productions with types who "look" their parts in preference to players who can act them, he found few chances to demonstrate his ability outside the cheaper stock organizations; for the only character he was physically fitted to portray was that of an actor.

An ill-starred impulse had led him to resign his latest stock connection in order to adventure in vaudeville with a one-act sketch written to his order by a hack manufacturer of such trash. Its "try-out week" in a provincial town had elicited no offers from other managers, and in the meantime his place in the stock company had been filled. At present he had a little money saved up, no immediate prospects of an engagement, good-humour, no illusions whatever.

"It's no good," he informed Miss May Dean on the occasion of their first meeting: "I know where I get off, all right. I can play anything they slip me, but these Broadway guys can't see my kind of actor. Give me a part I can sink my teeth into, and I'll shake it until the house climbs on the seats and howls. But that ain't what they're after, these days."

"The movies'll get you, if you don't watch out," May suggested cheerfully.

"That's right; and I'd be a knock-out in a film gang, too; I'm just their kind. That's what's become of all the old boys who still think Fourteenth Street's the Rialto, yunno. But me, I'm too strong for the noise an audience makes when they like you, or don't: I'd just as lief be hissed as get every hand in the house. Don't believe I could stand acting for a one-eyed box that didn't say anything but 'clickety-click.' I'd rather travel with the Uncle Tommers—honest'."

He was publicly morose for a moment or two. Then he roused: "Cheer up! The worst is yet to come. Maybe I can stick out till next spring, when Grady makes his next all-star revival. Wonder what he'll exhume this time? If it's only something like 'The Silver King,' or 'East Lynne,' I may yet cop out a chance to play to a two-dollar house.... Now, lis'n: I'm going down on the stoop and smoke a cigarette while you girls colour your maps for artificial light. The eats are on me tonight."

"Does that take in my little friend?" demanded Maizie, with a nod toward Joan.

Quard threw Joan a kindly glance: "Sure. Now, get a hustle on."

"But I can't," Joan protested. "I'm sorry—I'd love to—but I've got nothing fit to wear."

"You look pretty good to me as you stand," returned Quard. "Forget it, kid, and kick in."

"That's right," Maizie insisted. "Besides, I'll lend you a hat and a fresh fichu; you don't need any coat tonight, it's too rotten warm."

"Anyway," Quard said over his shoulder as he left the room, "we ain't booked for Sherry's."

In witness whereof, he introduced the girls to an obscure Italian boarding-house in Twenty-seventh Street, the proprietress of which admitted them only after examination through a grille in the front door. Quard explained to Joan that this precaution was necessary because the house served "red ink" with the meals and without benefit of a liquor license; hence, only friends could be admitted.

They dined by gas-light in the back-yard, under an awning which served the double purpose of excluding observation from the neighbouring dwellings and compressing the heated air. Perhaps two dozen tables crowded the enclosure. The male guests by common consent removed their coats and hung them on nails in the fence. The ladies emulated by discarding hats and all conventionalities of a nature to impede free expression of their temperaments. Maizie Dean even did without her English accent.

The meal was of a sort only to be consumed with impunity by optimists and Italians: a heavy soup, and all one could eat of it, spaghetti without end, a minute section of lukewarm blotting paper with a remote flavour of chicken, a salad, cheese and coffee, a half-bottle of atrocious red wine. Joan enjoyed it immensely; it has been said that her powers of digestion were exceptional.

Everybody seemed to know everybody else. Conversation was free between tables. Personalities were bandied back and forth amid intense glee. Quard, consuming enormous quantities of wine, proved himself a general favourite, a leading spirit. After dinner he called for a virulent green cordial (which Joan tasted but could not drink) and later returned to the wine. Before the end of the evening he became semi-maudlin, and on leaving exploited a highly humorous inability to walk a straight line. On the corner of Broadway he halted suddenly, bade the three women a slurred good night, and without other ceremony swung himself aboard a Broadway car.

His rudeness excited no comment from the Dancing Deans. They walked all the way home with Joan, unescorted. Joan was surprised to see by the clock in the Herald building that it was almost eleven. She thought she had never known an evening to pass so quickly and so pleasantly. What little wine she had consumed seemed to have affected her not at all, beyond rendering her keenly appreciative of this novel experience.

But she suffered the next morning from a slight and, to her, inexplicable headache.

It was four or five days later before she saw Quard again. He called early in the evening—but after dinner—and sat chatting amiably with the women for upwards of an hour before the real purpose of his visit transpired.

"I was talking to Reinhardt about an idea I got for a sketch, day before yesterday," he announced suddenly. "But he wanted fifty cash before he'd touch it, and seeing as it was him slipped me that other lemon, I told him merrily where he could go and went home and wrote it myself."

"You didn't!" Maizie exclaimed admiringly.

"You bet your life I did," the actor asseverated with conscious modesty. "Why not? It's no great stunt, writing; and besides it's all old junk I've done before, only hashed up a new way. All I had to do was to cop lines out of shows I've played in—sure-fire stuff, yunno—and write in names of characters. That's nothing."

"Oh, no, nothin' at all!" commented May Dean from her perch on the window-sill. "What's an author, anyway? Eight to five, girls, he's got the 'script on him. Get ready to duck."

"Wel-l!" Quard laughed—"you beat me to it, all right." He produced a sheaf of folded papers, smoothing them out upon his knee. "I just thought I'd see what you thought of it. If it's any good I'm going to read it to Schneider tomorrow and see what he'll offer me."

"Who's Schneider?" Maizie asked blankly.

"Agent for the film circuits," Quard replied.

"You don't mean you're thinkin' of fallin' for the four-a-day!"

"I'll try anything once; I'm not too proud to earn my bed and board in the dull season, anyhow. Besides, this thing would break into the Orpheum Circuit only over the dead body of Martin Beck. I'm no Georgie Cohan. But it oughta sandwich in between the pictures without anybody asking his ten cents back."

"You've got your nerve with you," Maizie commented darkly.

"Let him rave," May advised, exhaling cigarette smoke voluminously. "Shoot!"

Taking this for consent, Quard rattled the sheets of paper, tilted back his chair, and began to read.

His voice was flexible and sonorous; instinctively he declaimed the lines, extracting from each its full value. Now and again he lent emphasis to a phrase with an eloquent hand. But to Joan the composition was quite incoherent. She attended with wonder and a feeling of impatience because of her inability to understand what Quard seemed to relish with so much enthusiasm. It was, in fact, a worthless farrago of nonsense. None the less the two dancers laughed at encouraging intervals.

Flattered, Quard rose, removed his coat and began to act the lines, striding up and down the narrow space between the foot of the double-bed and the marble mantelpiece. The night was hot; a single gas-jet illumined the centre of the room; Quard perspired freely. For all that, his stenographic acting gave the thing some slight accent of humanity. It became a trifle, a mere trifle, more intelligible.

Seated on the window-sill, en profile to the room, her slight, wiry body attired sketchily in a kimono and short skirt, May Dean swung her legs and stared out into the darkness, an ironic smile hovering round her thin lips. Maizie lounged on the bed, tracing a meaningless pattern on the counterpane with a thin and rouge-stained forefinger. Joan occupied the only chair other than that at the disposal of the actor. She was very tired, and her attention wandered, even though Quard managed to draw it back now and then by some vivid trick of elocution or gesture. Vaguely sensitive to the magnetism of the man, her thoughts were occupied more with indefinite speculations about his personality than with the semi-plagiaristic and wholly commonplace concoction of cheap sentiment and tried-and-true "gags" which he professed to have written.

Physically he attracted her. Divested of his coat, his chest swelled impressively beneath a pink-striped silk shirt. When he lifted an arm, the clinging sleeve moulded itself to an admirable biceps. As he strode to and fro the stuff of his thin summer trousers shaped itself to legs that might have proved enviable to Sir Willoughby Patterne himself. His wide-lipped mouth disclosed an excellent outfit of large, white, strong teeth. His jet-black hair curled engagingly at his temples and over his generous pink ears. She liked his big, muscular, mobile hands....

She started suddenly, to discover that he had concluded and was facing her with an expectant expression, and sat up and smiled faintly, with embarrassment, trying to remember what it had all been about.

From the window, May Dean drawled languidly: "Is that the finish?"

Quard waved an arm. "Curtain!" he said; and sat down.

"My Gawd!" observed May thoughtfully.

He laughed uncomfortably: "As bad as all that?"

"It'd make a wonderful chaser," Maizie commented without lifting her eyes from the counterpane.

Quard turned desperately back to Joan. "What do you think of it, Miss Thursday?"

"I think so too," she said with all the animation she could muster. The other women laughed aloud. She flushed and added: "I mean, I think it's wonderful. I don't know what a chaser is."

"A chaser, dearie," Maizie explained in tones of acute commiseration, "is an act put on in the continuous houses to chase out the chair-warmers and make room for more."

"Well," said Quard, shuffling the manuscript, "I don't care if it is a chaser, so long as it stakes me to the eats till something else turns up."

On that day when she discovered the disappearance of John Matthias, Joan left the house later than had been her wont, and returned earlier, after a faint-hearted and abortive attempt to interview the stage-manager of a new musical production then being assembled to rehearse against an early opening in the Autumn.

The Deans were out. She had no place to go other than to her bare and lonely room, and she felt uncommonly hopeless and friendless. Subconsciously she had been holding in reserve, as a last hope, an appeal to the generosity of Matthias. He was a playwright, an intimate of managers: surely he would be able to suggest something, no matter how poorly paid or inconspicuous. Now, with the date of his return indefinite, she felt unjustly bereft of that last resource.

She spent two weary, wretched hours on her bed, harassed by a singularly fresh and clear perception of her unfitness, for the first time made conscious that she had actually possessed no reasonable excuse for her determination to go on the stage. Her qualifications, which hitherto might have been expressed, according to her own estimate, by the algebraic X, now assumed a value only to be indicated by a cipher. She had a good strong voice, it's true, but no ear whatever for music; she didn't "know steps" (Maizie's term, denoting ability for eccentric dancing) and of the art of acting she was completely ignorant. In fact, her theatrical ambitions had been founded more upon need of money than upon any real or fancied passion for the stage. Other girls had done likewise and bettered themselves: Joan knew no reason why she should fall short of their enviable achievements; but she was innocent of dramatic feeling and even of any real yearning for applause. Only her looks, of which she was confident, were to be counted upon to carry her beyond the stage doors.

She thought of her home, of her mother, her father, Edna and Butch, with a dull and temperate regret. Since that first afternoon she had never attempted to revisit them, and she felt now no inclination toward returning. Still, her thoughts yearned back to the miserable flat as to an assured shelter: there, at least, she had been safe from rude weather and positive hunger.

As things were with her, another week would find her destitute, but there was still the chance that something would turn up within that week. She felt almost sure that something would turn up. In this incurable optimism resided almost her sole endowment for the career of an actress: this, and a certain dogged temper which wouldn't permit her to acknowledge defeat until every possible expedient had been explored....

Toward evening she heard footsteps on the stairs. To her surprise they paused by her door, upon which fell a confident knock. Jumping up from her bed in a flurry, she answered to find Quard on the threshold.

No one had been farther from her thoughts. She stared, agape and speechless.

"Hello, Miss Thursday!" said the actor genially. "Can I come in?"

He entered, cast a comprehensive glance round the poor little room, deposited his hat upon the bed and himself beside it. Leaving the door open, and murmuring some inarticulate response, Joan turned back to her one chair.

"Hope I don't intrude," Quard rattled on cheerfully. "The girl told me the Deans was out and you in, so I took a chance and said I'd come right up."

"I—I'm sorry Maizie isn't home," stammered the girl.

"I ain't." Quard's eyes looked her over with open admiration. "I didn't want to see either of 'em, really. What I wanted was a little confab with you."

"With me!"

"Surest thing you know. I wanta talk business. I don't guess you've landed anything yet?"

Joan shook her head blankly.

"Well, I got a little proposition to make you. Yunno that sketch I wrote and you liked so much the other night?"

"Yes...."

"Well, I got hold of Schneider yesterday, and read it to him, and he says he can get me four or five weeks' booking at least, if I can put it over at the try-out. How does that strike you?"

"Why—I'm glad," Joan faltered, still mystified. "It must be fine to get something to do."

"Well, I haven't got it yet; and of course, maybe I won't get it. One of the first things you gotta learn in this business is, never spend your pay envelope till you got it in your mitt. And in this case, a lot depends on you."

"I don't get you," Joan returned frankly. "What've I got to do with it?"

Quard smiled indulgently, offered her a cigarette, which she refused, and lighted one for himself.

"If I can't get you to play the woman's part," he said, spurting twin jets of smoke through his nostrils, "it's all up—unless I can hitch up with summonelse just like you."

"You mean—you want me to—to act—?"

"Right, the very first time outa the box! Yunno, it's this way with these cheap houses: they can't afford to pay much for a turn, even a good one—and this one of ours is going to be about as bum as any act that ever broke through: take that from me. So it's up to me to find somebody who'll work with me for little enough money to leave something for myself, after I've squared up with the agent and stage-hands, and all that. You make me now?"

"Yes; but I haven't any experience—"

"That's just it: if you had, I couldn't afford you. But you gotta start sometime, and it won't do you no harm to get wise to what little I can teach you. Now the most I can count on dragging down for this act is sixty a week. I want twenty-five of that for myself. Fifteen, more will fix the agent and the rest. That leaves twenty for you. It ain't much, but it's a long sight better than nothing."

"But—how do you know I can do it?"

"That'll be all right. I know all about acting—anyway, I know enough to show you how to put across anything you'll have to do in this piece. Now how about it?"

"Why, I'll be glad—"

"Good enough. Now here: I've had this dope type-written, and here's your copy. Let's run through it now, and tonight you can start in learning. Tomorrow we'll have a rehearsal, and just as soon's we got our lines pat, we'll let Schneider have a pipe at it. Don't worry. It ain't going to be hard."

Thus reassured, but still a trifle dubious, Joan accepted a duplicate of the manuscript, and composed herself to follow to the best of her ability Quard's second reading.

This time he took less pains with his enunciation, scanned the lines more rapidly, and frequently interrupted himself in order to explain a trick of stage-craft or to detail with genuine gusto some bit of business which he counted upon to prove especially telling.

In consequence of this exposition, Joan acquired a much clearer understanding of the nature of the sketch. It concerned two persons only: a remarkably successful stage dancer, to be played by Joan; her convict husband, fresh from the penitentiary, by Quard. Scene: the dressing-room of the dancer. Time: just after the dancer's "turn." Joan, discovered "on", informs the audience of her fortunate circumstances through the medium of a brief soliloquy. Enter Quard (shambling gait, convict pallor, etc.) to inform her that she has been living in the lap of luxury during the eight years that he has been serving time: "I'm goin' to have my share now!" Comedy business: humorously brutal attitude toward wife; slangy description of prison life. ("They'll simply eat that up!"—Quard.) More comedy business involving a gratuitous box of property cigars and a cuspidor. Suddenly and without shadow of excuse, husband accuses wife of infidelity. Indignant denials; wife exhibits portrait of child born after commitment of husband, and of whose existence he has heretofore been ignorant: "It was for him I fought my way to the top of the ladder: he has your eyes!" Incontinently husband experiences change of heart; kisses photograph; snuffles into cap crushed between hands; slavers over wife's hand; refuses her offer of assistance; announces he will go West to "make a man of myself!" before returning to claim his wife and child. And the Curtain falls upon him in the act of going out, all broken up.

"Of course," Quard admitted, "it's bunk stuff, but we can put it across all right. I'm going to call it The Convict's Return and bill it as by Charles D'Arcy and Company. You'll be the company. I don't want to use my name, because it ain't going to do me any good to have it known I've taken to this graft, and if I'm lucky no one's going to spot me through my make-up."

Suddenly apprised by the failing light that the hour was growing late, he pocketed the manuscript and rose.

"Come on out and eat—business dinner. We'll talk things over, and I'll fetch you home early, so's you can start getting up on your lines."

They dined again at the Italian boarding-house. Quard drank but sparingly, considerably to the relief of Joan....

She was home by half-past eight, her head buzzing with her efforts to remember all he had told her, and sat up till three in the morning, conning the inhuman speeches of her part until she had them by rote; no very wonderful accomplishment, considering that the sketch was to play less than fifteen minutes, and that two-thirds of its lines were to be delivered by Quard.

But once with head on pillow, it was not her rôle that she remembered, but the man: his coarsely musical tones, his eloquent white hands, the overt admiration that shone in his eyes whenever he forgot his sketch and remembered momentarily Joan the woman. She felt sure he liked her. And she liked him well. Of the merits of his enterprise she knew nothing, but he had succeeded in inspiring her with confidence that he knew what he was about.

She drifted off into sleep, comforted by the conviction that she had found a friend.

By the time of her return from breakfast, the next morning, Quard was waiting for her at the lodging-house. He had already arranged with Madame Duprat for the use of the front parlour for rehearsals, pending its lease to some fortuitous tenant; and here he proceeded to work out the physical action of the sketch. His gratitude to Joan for knowing her part was almost affecting; he himself was by no means familiar with his own and her prompt response to cues he read from manuscript facilitated his task considerably. When they adjourned for luncheon he announced himself persuaded that they would be ready to "open" within a week.

Within that period Joan learned many things. She was a tractable and docile student, keen-set to profit by the scraps of dramatic chicanery which formed the major part of Quard's stage intelligence. He himself had a very fair memory and had been drilled by more than one competent stage-director whose instructions had stuck in his mind, forming a valuable addition to his professional equipment. Joan soon learned to speak out clearly; to infuse some little semblance of human feeling into several of her turgid lines; to suffer herself to be dragged by one wrist round the room on her knees, by the romantical convict; to time her actions by mental counting; to "feed lines" to her partner in a rapid patter through the passages of putative comedy. She learned also to answer to "dearie" as to her given name, and to submit to being handled in a way she did not like but which, from all that she could observe, was considered neither familiar nor objectionable as between people of the stage. And she learned, furthermore, that May Dean's opinion of the venture was never to be drawn beyond a mildly derisive "My Gawd!" while Maizie's ran to the sense that it was all a chance and Joan a little fool if she didn't grab it—and anyway Joan was old enough to take care of herself with Charlie Quard or any man living!

And it was Maizie who was responsible for insisting that Joan wheedle an advance of ten dollars from Quard, ostensibly toward the purchase of costume and make-up. But when this had been successfully negotiated, the dancers advised Joan to save it against an emergency, and between them provided her with an outfit composed of cast-offs: a black satin décolleté bodice, an accordion-pleated short skirt of the period of 1890, wear-proof silk stockings, a pair of broken-down satin slippers with red heels, a japanned tin make-up box with a broken lock, and a generous supply of cheap grease-paint and cold cream.

Joan's début occurred within the time-limit set by Quard and before an audience of two, not counting a few grinning stage-hands. The two were the agent Schneider, and the manager of a small moving-picture house in the Twenty-third Street shopping district; on the half-lighted stage of which their "try-out" took place at half-past ten of a rainy and disheartening morning. The judges sat in the darkened auditorium, staring apathetically and chewing large cigars. Joan, though a little self-conscious, was not at all nervous, and remembered her lines perfectly; better than this, she looked very fetching indeed in her makeshift costume. Quard forgot several of his speeches, floundered all over the stage, and in a frantic effort to redeem himself clowned his part outrageously. Nevertheless they were engaged.

Convinced of their failure, Joan had only succeeded in removing her make-up and struggling into her shabby street clothing, when Quard knocked at the door of her dressing-room. He had played without make-up, and consequently had been able to catch the manager and agent before they could escape. Lounging in the doorway, he breathed a spirit of congratulation strongly tainted with fumes of whiskey.

"We're on!" he declared exultantly. "What'd I tell you? You needn't have changed, because we're going to stick here, and open today. One of the turns on this week's bill fell down at the last minute, and so we cop this chance to fill in. We go on after the first films—about a quarter of one; and then at four-thirty, seven-thirty, ten-forty-five. Now whadda yunno about that?"

Joan gulped and shook her head, her eyes a little misty. For the first time she began to perceive that she had counted desperately on success.

"I think—we're awful' lucky!" she said faintly.

"Lucky nothing! I knew I could get away with it—always providing I had you to play up to."

"Me!"

"That's right. After we'd fixed things up I took Schneider down to the corner and bought him a drink. He said—I dunno as I ought to tell you this, but anyway—he said the sketch was punk (God knows it is) and never would've gone if it hadn't been for you. He said all the women would go crazy about you—you'd got the prettiest shape he'd seen in a month of Sundays. Yunno they get most of their afternoon houses from the women shoppers down here."

He paused and after a moment added meditatively: "Of course, you can't act for shucks."

Joan, looking down, said nothing. Quard dropped a hand intimately across her shoulder and infused a caressing note into his voice.

"I guess I'm a bad little guesser—eh, dearie?"

Joan stood motionless for an instant. His hand seemed as if afire, as if burning through her shirtwaist the flesh of her shoulder. And she resented passionately the intimacy of his tone. Of a sudden she shook his hand off and moved a pace or two away.

"Let me alone," she said sullenly.

Quard started and jerked out a "What?"

"I said, let me alone," she repeated in the same manner, looking him steadily in the face.

He coloured darkly, mumbled something indistinguishable, and flashed into a short-lived fit of temper.

"What's the matter with you, anyway?" he demanded hotly.

"What's the matter with you, anyway?" he demanded, hotly.

"Nothing," she replied quietly; "only I don't want to be pawed."

"No?" he exclaimed with sarcasm. "Is that straight?"

"Yes, that's straight—and so'm I!"

Recollecting himself, Quard attempted to carry off his discomfiture with a shrug and a laugh: "Oh, all right. Don't get huffy. I didn't mean anything."

"I know you didn't, but don't do it again."

He turned out into the corridor; hesitated. "Well—let it go at that, can't you?"

"All right," she said sulkily: "you let it go at that."

Quard tramped off without saying anything more, and, whatever his resentment and disappointment, schooled himself to control them, and met her half-way to a reconciliation when the approaching hour of their first public appearance brought them together in the wings.

And by this time Joan had been sufficiently diverted by other experiences to have regained her normal poise. The dingy, stuffy, and evil-smelling dressing-room to which she had been assigned had suffered an invasion of three other women: two worn and haggard clog-dancers and a matronly ballad-singer who, having donned an excessively soiled but showy evening gown, had settled down calmly to her knitting: an occupation which had interfered not in the least with her flow of animated and not unkindly gossip. Joan gathered that her voice was the main support of a small family, consisting of a shiftless husband and three children, for the younger of whom the mother was knitting a pair of small, pink bootees. These last had immediately enlisted the sympathetic interest of the clog-dancers, one of whom boasted of the precocity of her only child, a boy of eight living with his grandmother in Omaha, while the other told simply of the death of two children, due to neglect on the part of those to whom she had been obliged to entrust them while on the road....

Joan was the first to reach the entrance to the dingy "kitchen-set" which was to figure as a star dressing-room for the purposes of their sketch (and, for the purposes of subsequent offerings, as the drawing-room of a mansion on Fifth Avenue and the palm room of a fashionable hotel). About ten times the size of any dressing-room ever constructed, it was still atmospherically cheerless and depressing. She looked it over momentarily to make sure that the various simple properties were in place, and turned to find Quard approaching. Beneath the jaunty assurance which even his hang-dog make-up couldn't wholly disguise, she was able to detect traces of some uneasiness and anxiety.

It was a fact that he had grown a trifle afraid of her.

The discovery impressed her as so absurd that she smiled; and instantly the man was himself again. He thrust out a hand, to which with covert reluctance she entrusted her own.

"All right now?" he asked cheerfully.

She nodded: "All right."

"Good enough. Let's see what kind of a house we've got."

He found a peep-hole near the proscenium arch and peered intently through it for a moment or two; then beckoned Joan to take his place. But she could make but little of what seemed a dark well filled with flickering shadows. She turned away.

"Only a handful out there," Quard assured her. "It's too early for much of a crowd. No good getting nervous about this bunch."

"I'm not," she asserted quietly.

And she wasn't; no less to her own surprise than to Quard's, she was conscious of no trace of the stage-fright she had heard so much about. Indeed a singular feeling of indifference and disappointment oppressed her; it was all so unlike what she had looked forward to as the setting for her first appearance in public. The dreary and tawdry atmosphere behind the scenes of the dilapidated little theatre; the weary and subdued accents in which her dressing-room associates had discussed their offspring; the tinkle-tankle-tinkle-whang of a painfully automatic piano in the orchestra-pit; her own shabby second-hand costume; the brutal grotesqueness of Quard's painted countenance at close range—these owned little in common with those anticipations roused by the glitter and glamour of that fleshy show on the New York Theatre roof garden. She felt cheated; in perspective, even the stocking-counter seemed less uninviting....

A muffled outbreak of laughter and brief murmur of applause filtered through the curtain. The piano stopped with a crash. Quard nodded and, touching her elbow, urged her toward the entrance.

"Film's finished. Ready and steady, old girl."

"I'm all right," she said sullenly. "Don't you worry about me."

She heard the curtain rise with a rustling as of mighty wings penetrated by the shrill squeal of an ungreased block; held back a moment; and walked on, into a dazzling glare of footlights, conscious of no emotion whatever beyond desire to get finished with her part and return to the dressing-room. At the designated spot, near the centre of the stage, she paused, faced the audience with her trained smile and mouthed the opening lines with precisely the proper intonation....

The curtain fell at length amid a few, scattering hand-claps that sounded much like faint-hearted firecrackers exploding at a distance. Joan rose from the chair in which she had been seated in a posture simulating abandonment to tears of joy, and walked soberly off the stage—barely anticipating a few stage-hands, who rushed on to make the changes necessary for the next act.

Quard was waiting for her.

"Well," he said, "it didn't go so bad, did it?"

"No," she agreed listlessly.

"Anyhow, they didn't throw things at us."

"No." She endeavoured to smile, with indifferent success.

"I got a lot more laughs with that spittoon business than I thought I would," he continued thoughtfully as they turned back toward the dressing-rooms.

Joan made no reply, but when she stopped at the door of her dressing-room, Quard added tentatively:

"Anyway, it beats clerking in a department store, doesn't it?"

With some hesitation she replied: "I don't know...."

Immediately after her second public appearance in "The Convict's Return," Joan removed her make-up, changed to street dress and scurried through the rain to a Child's restaurant, not far from the theatre. In her excitement she had forgotten lunch and she was now thoroughly hungry. But she lingered purposely over the meal and even for some time after she had finished, preoccupied with self-dissection.

She was—at last!—an actress; but she was none the less singularly discontented. In a very brief time she had travelled a great way from the Joan Thursby of East Seventy-sixth Street; a world of emotion and experience already dissociated them; but she seemed to have profited little by the journey. She felt sure that she had started the wrong way to prove her ability to act. And foreseeing nothing better than her present circumstances, she questioned gravely an inscrutable future.

Instinctively she felt uneasy about this intimate, daily relationship with Quard. She wasn't afraid of him, but she was a little afraid of herself—because she liked him. Though still she dwelt in secret longing upon the image, half real, half fanciful, of a lover gentle and strong and fine—such an one as John Matthias might prove—for all that, Charlie Quard had the power to stir her pulses with a casual look of admiration, or with some careless note of tenderness in his accents.

The shower slashed viciously at the restaurant windows. At that hour there were few other patrons in the establishment, no lights to relieve the dismal greyness of the afternoon, and no sounds other than an infrequent clash of crockery, the muffled shuffling of waitresses' feet, and their subdued voices, the melancholy and incessant crepitation of the downpour.

Joan was sensible to the approach of an exquisite despondency; and in alarm, fearing to think too deeply, she arose, ran back to the theatre and on impulse paid her way in through the front, to watch the flickering phantasmagoria of the flying films and to sit in judgment on the antics of her fellows on the variety bill. She was in no hurry to return to the dressing-room, with its smells of grease-paint, scented powder, ordinary perfumes, sweat, stale cigarette-smoke, gin, and broken food. One of the clog-dancers claimed a tubercular tendency, for which she asserted gin to be a sovereign specific; but as the day ran on was even forgetting, at times, to cough by way of an overture to recourse to the bottle. The other, viewing this proceeding with public disfavour, had opened up an apparently inexhaustible and hopelessly monotonous store of reminiscence of the privations she had endured in consequence of "Fanny's weakness." Joan gathered that the two were forever being dropped from one bill after another because of Fanny's weakness.

And of this she had five more days to anticipate and to endure....

She crawled back to Forty-fifth Street at half-past eleven, that night, so dog-tired that she had neither the heart nor the strength to call on the Deans with her good news; this though there were sounds of discreet revelry audible through the door of the second-floor front....

Somehow the week wore out without misadventure. Joan walked through her part with increasing confidence. Quard left her very much to herself when they were off the stage; indeed, he spent no more time in the theatre than was absolutely necessary. What he did out of it she did not know, but from the frequency with which he played his part with an alcoholic breath, she surmised that he was solacing himself in conventional manner for his degradation to "the four-a-day."

On the third day the clog-dancers were dispensed with for the reason forecast, their place being taken by two female acrobats of a family troupe, who lolled about for eleven hours at a stretch in their grimy pink tights and had little to say either to Joan or to the matronly lady with the robust voice and the knitting. But the change was a wholesome one for the dressing-room.

The following week Charles D'Arcy & Company played at another house of equal unpretentiousness, on the East Side, and the week after that was divided between two other theatres. And on Wednesday of the fourth week—they were then in Harlem—what Joan had vaguely foreseen and hoped against, happened.

Quard turned up in the morning with red-rimmed eyes, a flushed face and a thick tongue blatantly advertising a night of sleepless drunkenness. By sheer force of an admirable physique and the instinct of a trained actor, he contrived to play the first turn without mishap, snatched a little sleep in his dressing-room, and seemed almost his everyday self at the next repetition. But after that he left the theatre to drug his jangling nerves with more whiskey; and appeared at the final repetition so stupefied that he would not have been permitted to go on the stage but for remissness on the part of the stage-manager. Before he had been five minutes on view he was hooted off and the curtain was rung down amid an uproar.

Once back in her dressing-room (where she was alone, since their act was the last on the bill and the rest of the performers had already left the theatre) Joan gave way to a semi-hysterical tempest of tears. It was her first experience at close quarters with a man in hopeless intoxication, and while Quard's surrender was too abject to terrify, she was faint with disgust of him and incensed beyond measure with him for having subjected her to those terrible five minutes before a howling audience. With this, she was poignantly aware that henceforth their offering was "cold": by morning Quard's name would be upon the black-list and further booking impossible to secure. She might as well count herself once more out of work, and now in even less hopeful circumstances than when first she had struck out for herself; for then she had been buoyed up by the fatuous confidence of complete inexperience, and then she had been comparatively affluent in the possession of twenty-two dollars. Now she knew how desperately hard was the way she must climb, and she had less than five dollars. What little she had been able to set aside out of her weekly wage had gone to purchase some sorely needed supplements to her meagre wardrobe.

It was some time before she could collect herself enough to dabble her swollen eyes with cold water, scrub off her make-up, and change for the street.

She stole away presently across an empty and desolate stage and through the blind, black alley leading from the stage-door to One-hundred-and-twenty-fifth Street. She felt somewhat relieved and comforted by the clean night air and the multitude of lights—the sense of normal life fluent in its accustomed, orderly channels. It seemed, in her excited fancy, like escaping from the foul, choking atmosphere of a madhouse....

The theatre was near Third Avenue, toward which Joan hurried, meaning to board a southbound car and transfer to Forty-second Street. But as she neared the corner she checked sharply, and (simple curiosity proving stronger than her impulse to fly across the street) went more slowly—only a few yards behind a figure that she knew too well—a swaying figure with weaving feet.

Vastly different from the carefully overdressed, dandified person he had been at their first meeting, Quard stumbled on, his hands deep in pockets, head low between his shoulders, a straw hat jammed down over his eyes. Obviously he was without definite notion of either his where-abouts or his destination. Passers-by gave him a wide berth.

He seemed so broken and helpless that pity replaced horror and indignation in the heart of the girl. After all, he hadn't been unkind to her; but for him she would long since have gone to the wall; and ever since their clash on the day of the try-out, he had treated her with a studied respect which had pleased her, apprehensive though she had remained of a renewal of his advances.

Suddenly, and quite without premeditation, she darted forward and plucked Quard by the sleeve just as he was on the point of staggering through the swinging doors of a corner saloon. If her impulse had been at all articulate, she would have said that this was, in such extremity, the least she could do—to try to save him from himself.

"Charlie!" she cried. "No, Charlie—don't be a fool!"

The man halted and, turning, reeled against the door-post. "Wasmasr?" he asked thickly. Then recognition stirred in his bemused brain. "Why, it's lil Joan Thursh'y...."

"Come away," she insisted nervously. "Don't be a fool. Don't go in there. Go home."

He moved his head waggishly. "Thash where 'm goin'—home—soon's I brace up a bit."

"Come away!" Joan repeated sharply, dragging at his cuff. "Do you hear? Come away. A walk'll straighten you out better'n anything else."

"Walk, eh?" Quard lifted his chin and lurched away from the door-post. "Y' wanna take walk with me? All right"—indulgently—"I'll walk with you, lil one, 's far's y' like."

"Come, then!" she persisted. "Hurry—it's late."

He yielded peaceably, with a sodden chuckle; but as he turned the lights of the saloon illumined his face vividly for an instant, and provided Joan with a fresh and appalling problem. The man had forgotten to remove his make-up; his mouth and jaws were plastered with a coat of bluish-grey paint, to suggest a week's growth of beard when viewed across footlights; there were wide blue rings round his eyes, and splashes of some silvery mixture on his dark hair. His face was a burlesque mask, so extravagant that it could not well escape observation in any steady light. It was impossible for Joan to be seen publicly with him—in a street-car, for instance. But now that she had taken charge of him, she couldn't gain her own consent to abandon the man to the potentially fatal whims of his condition. For a moment aghast and hesitant, in another she recognized how unavoidable was the necessity of adopting the suggestion his stupefied wits had twisted out of her pleadings: she would have to walk with him a little way, at least until he could recover to some slight extent.

Indeed, even had she desired to, she would probably have found it difficult to get rid of him just then; for in an attempt to steady himself, Quard grasped her arm just above the elbow; and this grip he maintained firmly without Joan's daring to resent it openly. She was to that extent afraid of his drunkenness, afraid of his uncertain temper.

Submissively, then, she piloted him to the south side of the street, where with fewer lighted shop-windows there was consequently less publicity, and to Lexington Avenue, turning south and then west through the comparative obscurity of One-hundred-and-twenty-fourth Street. Neither spoke until they had traversed a considerable distance and turned south again on Lenox Avenue. The streets were quiet, peopled with few wayfarers; and these few hurried past them with brief, incurious glances if not with that blind indifference which is largely characteristic of the people of New York. Quard suffered himself to be led with a docility as grateful as it had been unexpected. It was apparent to the girl that he was making, subconsciously at least, a strong effort to control his erratic feet. He retained her arm, however, until they were near One-hundred-and-sixteenth Street: when, noticing the lights of a corner drug-store, the girl held back.

A swift glance roundabout discovered nobody near.

"Where's your handkerchief, Charlie?" she demanded.

"Where's whash? Whashmasser?"

"I say," she repeated impatiently, "where's your handkerchief? Get it out and scrub some of that paint off your face. Do you hear? You look like a fool."

"'M a fool," Quard admitted gravely, fumbling through his pockets.

"Well, I won't be seen with you looking like that. Hurry up!"

Her peremptory accents roused him a little. He found his handkerchief and began laboriously and ineffectually to smear his face with it, with the sole result of spreading the colour instead of removing it. In this occupation, he released her arm. With a testy exclamation, Joan snatched the handkerchief from him and began to scour his cheeks and jaws, heedless whether he liked it or not. To this treatment he resigned himself without protest—with, in fact, almost ludicrous complaisance, lowering his head and thrusting it forward as if eager for the scrubbing.

For all her willingness she could accomplish little without cold cream. When at length she gave it up, his jowls were only a few shades lighter. She shrugged with despair, and threw away the greasy handkerchief.

"It's no use," she said. "It just won't come off! You'll have to go as you are."

"Whash that? Go where?"

"Now listen, Charlie," she said imperatively: "see that drug-store on the corner? You go in there and ask the man to give you something to straighten you out."

Quard nodded solemnly, fixed the lighted show-window with a steadfast glare, and repeated: "So'thin' to straighten m' out."

"That's it. Go on, now. I'll wait here."

He wagged a playful forefinger at her. "Min' y' do," he mumbled, and wandered off.

"And—Charlie!—get him to let you wash your face," she called after the man.

Waiting in the friendly shadow of a tree, she watched him anxiously through the window; saw him turn to the soda-fountain and make his wants known to the clerk, who with a nod of comprehension and a smile of contempt began at once to juggle bottles and a glass.

Singularly enough, it never occurred to the girl to seize this chance to escape. She was now accepting the situation without question or resentment. Quard seemed to her little better than an overgrown, irresponsible child, requiring no less care. Somebody had to serve him instead of his aberrant wits. To leave him to himself would be sheer inhumanity.... But she reasoned about his case far less than she felt, and for the most part acted in obedience to simple instinct.

She saw him drain a long draught of some whitish, foaming mixture, pay and reel out of the store. He had, of course, forgotten (if he had heard) her plea to remove the remainder of his make-up. She was angry with him on that account, as angry as she might have been with a heedless youngster. But she did not let this appear. She moved quickly to his side.

"Come on," she said quietly, turning southward; "you've got to walk a lot more."

He checked, mumbled inarticulately, staring at her with glazed eyes, but in the end yielded passively. In silence they continued to One-hundred-and-tenth Street, Joan watching him furtively but narrowly. The drug worked more slowly than she had hoped. Primarily, in fact, it seemed only to thicken the cloud that befogged his wits. But by the time they had gained the last-named street, she noticed that he was beginning to walk with some little more confidence.

He now seemed quite ignorant of her company—strode on without a word or glance aside. They crossed to Central Park and, entering, began to thread a winding path up the wooded rises of its northwestern face. Momentarily, now, there was an increasing assurance apparent in the movements of the man. He trudged along steadily, but with evident effort, like one embarrassed by a heavy weariness. His breathing was quick and stertorous.

The park seemed very quiet. Joan wondered at this, until she remembered that it must have been nearly midnight when they stopped at the drug-store. She had noticed idly that the clerk had interrupted preparations to close in order to wait on Quard.

They met nobody afoot, not even a policeman; but here and there, upon benches protected by umbrageous foliage, figures were vaguely discernible; men and women, a pair to a bench, sitting very near to one another when not locked in bold embraces. Joan heard their voices, gentle, murmurous, fond. These sights and sounds, the intimations they distilled, would at a previous time have moved the girl either to derision or to envy; now she felt only a profoundly sympathetic compassion, new and strange to her, quite inexplicable.

Near the top of the hill they found a bench set in the stark glare of an arc-light, and therefore unoccupied. Upon this Quard threw himself as if exhausted. He said nothing, seemed wholly oblivious of his companion. Immediately he was seated his chin dropped forward on his chest, his hat fell off, his arms and legs dangled inertly. He appeared to sink at once into impregnable slumber; yet Joan was somehow intuitively aware that he wasn't asleep.

She herself was very weary, but she couldn't leave him now, at the mercy of any prowling vagabond of the park. Picking up his hat, she sat down beside him with it in her lap, glad of the chance to rest. She was at once and incongruously not sleepy and thoughtless. Convinced that Quard was coming to himself, she was no longer troubled by solicitude; her wits wandered in a vast vacuity, sensitive only to dull impressions. She felt the immense hush that brooded over the park, a hush that was rendered emphatic by the muffled but audible and fast drumming of the man's over-stimulated heart, straining its utmost to pump and cleanse away the toxic stuff in his blood; the infrequent rumble and grinding of a surface-car on Central Park West seemed a little noise in comparison. Now and again a long thin line of glimmering car-windows would wind snakily round the lofty curve of the Elevated structure at One-hundred-and-tenth Street. Beyond, the great bulk of the unfinished cathedral on Morningside Heights loomed black against a broken sky of clouds.

At one time a policeman passed them, strolling lazily, helmet in hand while he mopped his brow. His stare was curious for the two silent and ill-assorted figures on the bench. Joan returned it with insolent and aggressive interest, as if to demand what business it was of his. He grinned indulgently, and passed on.

She had lost track of time entirely when Quard stirred, sighed, lifted his head and sat up with a gesture of deep despondency. The movement roused her from a dull, lethargic, waking dream.

"Feeling better, Charlie?" she asked with assumed lightness.

He nodded and groaned, without looking at her.

"Able to go home yet?"

"In a minute," he said drearily.

"Where do you live?" she persisted.

He waved a hand indifferently westward. "Over there—Ninety-sixth Street."

"Think you'll be able to walk it?"

"Oh, I'm all right now." He groaned again, and leaned forward, elbow on knee, forehead in his hand. "I feel like hell," he muttered.

"The best thing for you is to get to bed and get some sleep," said the girl, stirring restlessly.

He snapped crossly: "Wait a minute, can't you?"

She subsided.

"I guess you know I've gummed this thing all up, don't you?" he asked at length.

"Yes, I guess you have," she replied, listless.

"And, of course"—bitterly—"it's all my fault...."

To this she answered nothing.

"Well, I'm sorry," he pursued in a sullen voice. "I guess I can't say any more'n that."

She sighed: "I guess it can't be helped."

He leaned back again, explored a pocket, brought to light a roll of money, with shaking hands stripped off four bills. "Well, anyway, there's your bit."

Taking the bills, she examined them carefully. "That's a whole week," she said, surprised.

"All right; it's coming to you."

With neither thanks nor further protest, she put the money away in her pocket-book.

"You've acted like a brick to me," he continued.

"Don't let's talk about that now—"

"I don't want you should think I don't appreciate it. If it hadn't been for you, I don't know when I'd've got home—chances are, not till tomorrow night, anyway. The old woman'd've been half crazy."

Joan kept silence.

"My mother," he amended, with a sidelong glance. "There's only the two of us."

"Well," said the girl rising, "if that's so, you'd better get home to her; she won't be any too happy until she sees you—and not then."

Reluctantly he got to his feet. "She thinks I'm a great actor," he observed bitterly; "and I'm nothing but a damn' drunken—"

Joan interrupted roughly: "Ah, can that bunk: it'll keep till tomorrow—and maybe you'll mean it then."

He subsided into silence, whether offended or penitent she neither knew nor cared. She gave him his hat, avoiding his look, and without further speech they found their way out to the gate at One-hundred-and-third Street. Here Joan paused to await an Eighth Avenue car.

"You'd better walk all the way home, even if you don't feel like it," she advised Quard brusquely. "It won't do you any harm, and that mop of yours is a sight."

"All right," he assented. He moved tentatively a foot or so away, checked, turned back. "I suppose this is good-bye—?" he said, offering his hand.

"I guess it is," she agreed without emotion. Barely touching his clammy and tremulous fingers, she hastily withdrew her own.

A southbound car was swinging down to them, not a block distant. Quard eyed it with morose disfavour.

"At that," he said suddenly, "maybe this wouldn't've happened if you hadn't been so stand-offish. I only wanted to be friends—"

In her exasperation Joan gave an excellent imitation of Miss May Dean's favourite ejaculation. "My Gawd!" she said scornfully—"if you can't think of any better excuse for being a souse than to blame it on me.... Good night!"

The car pulled up for her. She climbed aboard—left him staring.