"I'm so glad you are getting used to the Y. W. C. A.," Miss Adair answered, giving him a delighted smile as he seated himself beside her while Valentine started the car up the avenue. "Mr. Height said it was like being forced to go to church in a strange town and getting into somebody's cozy corner by mistake."

"I wish I were married to that girl, to-night," Mr. Vandeford exclaimed out of the sudden rush of anxiety that had overtaken him by this fledgling author's mention of his leading man.

"Then who would be taking me out, out on Broadway?" asked Miss Adair with a little laugh that had a more distinctly friendly note in it than it had before held for him.

"Both of us," replied Mr. Vandeford, with an answering laugh that sounded much too young in his own ears. "You'll need two."

"Am I going to have as many dreadful things happen to me to-night as I was going to have when I met Mr. Corbett and Mr. Benjamin David and Mr. Height and the other theatrical people? Am I being warned again?" Mr. Vandeford accepted the teasing and laughed at himself.

"My wings are up. Go out and scratch for yourself."

"Not very far, though," Miss Adair answered. Mr. Vandeford was not sure that she moved a fraction of an inch nearer to him, but he hoped so. "I feel just the same about you as I do about Roger and I like to be going with you—into—into danger."

"Who's Roger?" questioned Mr. Vandeford.

"He's my brother, who treats me as you do. It's fun for a woman to be frightened dreadfully when she is with a man she likes." Again there was that uncertainty as to whether Miss Adair fluttered a fraction of an inch in his direction, and for the life of him Mr. Vandeford could not say whence had flown all the many ways he would have commanded ordinarily for the finding out if such were the case.

"A frightened woman is often rather—rather deadly to a man," he answered before he could stop himself. The habit of speaking out directly to Miss Adair was growing on him, he perceived, and it alarmed him.

"Into what danger are you taking me now?" asked Miss Adair with a fluty, merry laugh.

"We are going with Mr. Farraday and Miss Hawtry to see the Big Show and to the Grove Garden on the roof afterward for supper. Just a slow, usual sort of an evening, but Denny thought it would be fun for you to see the Big Show and the Big Feed and the Big Dance by way of initiation," Mr. Vandeford answered, with an entire lack of enthusiasm.

"I wanted to see what you wanted me to see this first night," Miss Adair said with the affectionate frankness of six years going on seven. "What would that be?"

"We'll see it to-morrow night," Mr. Vandeford answered her, and this time the tenderness in his voice surprised him and he considered it entirely unjustifiable.

"Mr. Height was going to take me to see Maude Adams, but I know he'll put it off again when I tell him that you want me to—"

"No, don't! Let Height get Maude Adams out of his system, for Heaven's sake," snapped Mr. Vandeford, this time in unjustifiable temper.

"Why, what is—" Miss Adair was asking of Mr. Vandeford in positive alarm when Valentine stopped before the blazing doorway of the Big Show. A functionary seven feet tall opened the door of the car and all but literally extracted them by force, for he was anxious to repeat the operation on the occupants of the car chugging behind them.

Now, there are many, many fair women born within the state lines of Old Kentucky who live calm and peaceful lives and die and are buried with no greater contrast of experience than comes from birth and death, love and hate, riches and poverty, and they never know the difference; but occasionally one bursts out of her bonds and flames her beauty over strange worlds, in foreign embassies, in the courts of St. James or Petrograd, or in an opera or theater box in New York. When this eruption occurs many sparks fly. And many sparks from bright eyes were showered on the author of "The Purple Slipper," who sat calmly unaware in the left stage-box of the Big Show that August night beside the notorious Hawtry, Mr. Godfrey Vandeford, and Mr. Dennis Farraday. And of the sparks no one was more conscious than both Miss Hawtry and Mr. Vandeford, while big Dennis was in a blissfully ignorant state of mind like to that of Miss Patricia Adair of Adairville, Kentucky. Though he had been for about forty-eight hours a producer on the rear side of the footlights, Mr. Farraday still had the attitude of mind possessed by one of an audience, and he watched the stage rather than the "front." He thus failed to get the impression created by his guest from Kentucky, and blissfully left Mr. Vandeford to deal with her sensations derived from the show. Mr. Vandeford had his hands full.

To Miss Adair the Big Show was a series of mental and moral and artistic explosions. She sat with delight through the Japanese acrobats and Swiss quartette of yodelers, and she welcomed pretty, pert little Mazie Villines with enthusiasm that gradually faded into horror as that artist flaunted more and more lingerie and "dished the dirt" which the inebriate playwright, at that moment engaged in "putting pep" into Miss Adair's own beloved "Purple Slipper," nee "The Renunciation of Rosalind," had supplied. The "dirt" was received by the audience at large with a hilarious joy that entirely justified the managers of the Big Show for keeping Mazie busy "dishing."

However, all things come to an end, and with a last provocative, revealing kick Mazie was allowed to depart and give way to a pair of young dancers who promised to display wares more wholesome.

Without knowing why he did it, Mr. Vandeford leaned forward so that his left ear was within reach of the whisper of Miss Adair's lips as she turned her head and tilted it like a droopy flower toward his.

"I've only seen Sarah Bernhardt and John Drew and Maude Adams and Mansfield and Joe Jefferson and Arliss and the Coburns, up in Louisville," she faltered with her eyes questioning his and wide open with horror.

"These next ones aren't so bad, and we'll go before any more come on that—that you won't like," he whispered in return. He had glanced through the program and seen that the climax would be an exhibition of jungle courtship by one of America's most notorious women and her partner, done to extreme negroid melody.

"Thank you," she murmured as she turned to watch the willowy youth and maid go through some very beautiful movements of the dance that was entirely unobjectionable. In two minutes she had turned her face, beaming with pleasure, so that Mr. Vandeford could see that all was well with her; and ten minutes later she giggled out loud at the repartee of two black-faced artists.

During the respite that his knowledge of the numbers on the program gave him, Mr. Vandeford did more of his peculiar brand of thinking, and reached a diplomatic conclusion. By the intermission, which came just before the jungle "big number" to give late comers time to gather in for their salacious feast, he was ready to act.

"Miss Adair and I are going to get a breath of air," he announced.

"But the big number is next, and she might miss it," objected Miss Hawtry, with solicitude for Miss Adair's pleasure. Mr. Vandeford had thought past just that objection delivered by Miss Hawtry, and he knew that in no way must he seem to be shielding the author of "The Purple Slipper" from the salaciousness that gave Miss Hawtry great joy. If he went too far in any act of comparative analysis he would bring danger upon "The Purple Slipper," with whose fate Miss Adair's was one.

"We'll be back in plenty of time," he lied.

"Be sure!" Miss Hawtry commanded, and then turned to devote herself to Mr. Farraday, who was laying himself out to salve what he thought must be her pain at the loss of his beloved friend. The Violet had soon caught his attitude toward her, and was encouraging his chivalry in every way possible by the most pensive of poses as the generous deserted. Such a situation is all to a woman's advantage if she knows how to work it, and Miss Hawtry possessed that knowledge.

"Van ought to have a medical degree for operating young girls' eyes open, and making them see rose-colored for a while," she said with a good-humored smile and a soft little sigh, as she raised her Irish eyes in all their softness to Mr. Farraday's.

To this insinuation, founded on an implied lie as far as the Hawtry was concerned, Mr. Farraday made no reply, but turned to greet with fitting applause the great dancer, on whose account one of the American artistic bright lights had been extinguished forever, and in ten seconds was inwardly thanking Vandeford for extracting Miss Adair before she had felt the blighting smirch of the big number. While Mr. Farraday watched the exhibition before him, Mr. Vandeford was amusing the child of their joint solicitude by letting her look at the white lights. While waiting at the curb before the Big Show for the large dignitary in uniform to summon Valentine, he had directed that worthy to have a message sent in to Miss Hawtry that they would join her at supper. Then upon the arrival of his car, he had carefully inserted Miss Adair before he had said to the puzzled Valentine:

"Drive slowly down around the circle and down Broadway, so that you can come back just while the theater crowd is on."

Some instinct had led Mr. Vandeford to choose exactly the panacea to soothe Miss Adair's shock—the lights of Broadway.

"It's like fairy-land," she gasped, as they rolled down past Forty-seventh Street. "Oh, look at the kitten chasing the spool, all in electric lights!"

"Wait a minute, and I'll show you an eagle flop his wings," promised Mr. Vandeford, and he was surprised that he seemed for the first time to feel the actual glory of the electric signs on his great Broadway, which is as much of an all-American institution as the shipyards in Brooklyn.

"All the world is on fire, and everybody is going to it," Miss Adair exclaimed, as Valentine made his return just as the theaters were pouring their crowds out into the seething maelstrom of the great scintillating canon. She watched as the big car stood motionless before a stream of humanity that poured across its front wheels and then bounded forward as blue-coated arms stemmed the tide on the edges of both sidewalks for a few brief minutes in which they were allowed to progress to a street beyond, where they were again halted, wedged in with other impatient, purring cars.

In a limousine next her Miss Adair saw a boy in a top hat, with white gloves upon his hands, smother in an eager and unabashed embrace a white-shouldered girl, whose arms went around his neck regardless of "mother" assiduously looking the other way. In a car on the other side a richly garbed gentleman dozed upon his cushions in triumphant inebriety. Also, while she and Vandeford waited, she saw a guardian spinster shoo a bevy of school-girls across in front of the cars, and turn in the middle of the street to reprove a college boy for a laughing word tossed to the combined bevy, while the blue arms on both sidewalks waved her into haste so that they might unleash their restrained monster motors. Everywhere protective men had women's arms fastened within their own and were shoving through the throng, while other men and women jostled along by themselves, or in companies of twos and threes, with laughing good nature. Fakirs were crying many wares, and in and out squirmed newsboys calling war extras in words that seemed to imply that New York was being shelled from the sea, but did not make that exact statement.

"It's all the world, and I'm a part of it," Miss Adair again said, and Mr. Vandeford was again surprised at himself that he was not surprised to find tears glinting in the sea-gray eyes raised to his.

"This is the Big Show," he said with a little answering thrill in his own voice, as the enormity of the scene he had witnessed night after night broke on him for the first time.

"They all live here and sleep here and eat here and work here and—and—love here," she said softly, and smiled, for again the limousine with the embracing lovers had paused by the side of Valentine's car, and the embrace still held.

"No, the sleepers and eaters and workers of New York were in bed long ago. Everybody you see here in this push has his or her vital wires connected up at Squeedunck, Illinois, or Zanesville, Indiana or—"

"Or in Adairville, Kentucky," Miss Adair added with a laugh.

"No, you belong—anywhere. Creative people ought to have no—no home wires," Mr. Vandeford answered, and there was a queer sadness in his voice that he did not himself understand. "People with messages must have masses to hand them to. That's why you came, and, I suppose, must stay."

"Yes," answered Miss Adair, "I want to stay—if you'll let me."

"I can't do otherwise," Mr. Vandeford answered her. Then he turned and looked her full in her serious eyes. "But if you stay you will have to accept broad standards, or suffer."

"That Mazie woman?"

"Maybe worse."

She sat silent until, a few moments later, Valentine drew up again at the curb before the Big Show, which had been out long enough to disperse most of its crowd, and was now receiving supper guests for the Garden Grove above.

"I'm going to stay—with you—and 'The Purple Slipper,'" she announced, as he reached into the car for her and swung her to the pavement.

"Goes!" he answered, with mingled emotions, which he could not have analyzed.

Miss Adair was as good as her word. She accepted the reveling crowd of the garden, looked upon the abandon of drinking women and men, with only a slightly hunted expression in her eyes, and with her slim white hands applauded Simone when that artist made most audacious slings of her supple body in its scant clothing. She beamed upon the dancer when, as Mrs. Trevor, she came, at Mr. Farraday's invitation, to have a glass of champagne with them, and she quailed only once, when a band of extremely young girls, clothed in filmy garments, took tiny search-lights and went merrily hunting among the tables of laughing men and women after the lights had been put out for the sport. Her horror at observing Mr. Vandeford, who sat between her and the narrow aisle take various moneys from his pocket to defend himself from successive hunters, made her pale, and the moment the lights were flashed on again she rose to go.

"Wonder what they'll do next," muttered Mr. Farraday, as he helped her into her wrap. Mr. Vandeford was not looking at his author or speaking. Once when he had put his hand in his pocket to get out a coin for one of the teasing girls with her search-light he had felt the Y. W. C. A. latch-key there, and it had short-circuited him entirely.

"I know you are tired. It takes some time to get the New York pace, but you'll strike it. I think I'll stay to see the next Folly with Mr. Farraday," he heard the Violet saying to Miss Adair, and still short-circuited, he went with his calm young author down to the car. The hour was one-thirty, and a moon had climbed the heights of the Broadway canon. Valentine, with some sort of psychic direction, went across Central Park and down wide, clean, silent, and dimly lighted Fifth Avenue. Both Mr. Vandeford and Miss Adair were silent, and he was not aware that she was crying until just before they turned into her side street.

"They were so young, those girls, and they—they didn't want to—to do that," she said with little catches in her beautiful, slurring, Blue-grass voice.

"Maybe they didn't; but they wouldn't go back now, not one," he answered her.

She was silenced, and stood quiet beside him as he opened the door of the big, gloomy, protective building, with the key the woman of another world than his had intrusted to him.

"I know," she said at last, as she held out her hand to him. And because it trembled ever so slightly and was cold, he put his warm lips to it for a second before he handed her into a great international safety. He remembered the key, but he didn't give it to her. Somehow he wanted it himself. He liked the feel of it in his pocket.

"Wish I had Denny locked up in the Christian association!" he growled to himself as Valentine whirled him home.

Just at that exact moment Mr. Dennis Farraday sat in Miss Violet Hawtry's Louis Quinze parlor at the Claridge, engaged in tenderly and awkwardly patting that star's sobbing white shoulder, as she lay on just such a couch as Manon Lescaut probably had had for just such scenes.

"I don't blame him at all," sobbed Miss Hawtry, provocatively, with the art of long practice both on the stage and off. "My kind always loses to hers when the time comes."

"Don't!" pleaded Mr. Farraday. It was all he could or was willing to plead at that moment.

"But I want to make good in this play for him and her—and you—before I go out of his life forever. I want to repay him with—with both money and happiness. He made me an artist." With these words Miss Hawtry made an acknowledgment of the truth that she herself really believed to be untrue, because she saw that to praise Mr. Vandeford was the best way to blind Mr. Farraday while she approached him in that blindness. She knew that his loyalty to his David would be a barrier unless she used it as a ladder.

"My God! How—how great women are!" was the immediate and hoped-for response she drew from the big Jonathan.

"My art must fill my life now. Only there will be—friendship. You make me see that by the comfort of your kindness." Miss Hawtry laid her flushed cheek in the hollow of good Dennis's big warm hand. The moment was tense, but Hawtry had timed her line a little too far ahead, and it failed to get across. The prey was as embarrassed as a girl and, with another brotherly pat, arose to go.

"You'll always let me do anything I can, won't you?" he asked as he looked down upon her for a second, then took a considerate departure.

"Boob!" muttered Hawtry to herself, as she rose and rang for Susette.

There are in this little old world many men like Dennis Farraday; only none of its inhabitants admit their existence.

After the evening of the introduction of its author to Broadway, things spun fast and furiously in the business of producing "The Purple Slipper," and during the whirlwind of the day Miss Adair sat either in her own private office or in the chair beside Mr. Vandeford, and reveled in the excitement, and in the evenings did other revelings. She had her evening with Mr. Height under the spell of Barrie and Maude Adams, and Mr. Vandeford swore under his breath when she reported to him that they had gone to the concert on the roof of the Waldorf for an hour, and had got back to her abiding-place in time not to need the latch-key, which still reposed in his pocket. He knew Gerald Height, and he was puzzled and alarmed at this wary approach.

Mrs. Farraday came to town, and the dinner-party in her staid, old Washington Square home, with himself and Miss Lindsey and Miss Adair as guests, was like a day's vacation for Mr. Vandeford. Also, he got a complete off-guard picture of Miss Adair as he would see her in Adairville, Kentucky, for she and the beautiful and stately Mrs. Farraday spoke the same language and had the same forms.

"My dear child, you positively must come up to Westchester for this week-end! Matilda Van Tyne is going to come for the first blooming of the rhododendrons in the West Marsh, and I feel sure that she must have known your mother in some of her visits to Lexington. She must see you and hear all about the play. Now, Dennis, make all the arrangements." Mrs. Farraday gave her commands as a queen is accustomed to deliver them.

"May I go?" Miss Adair asked of Mr. Vandeford, her shining gray eyes raised to his with deference and confidence as usual.

"You may," answered Mr. Vandeford, aware that Mrs. Farraday's keen eyes of the world were fixed upon him in a speculative way. "The rehearsals will begin at eleven on Monday, and you can be back in plenty of time."

"And, Miss Lindsey, will you come, too, with Miss Adair?" Mrs. Farraday surprised both her son and Mr. Vandeford by asking the young Westerner with the greatest graciousness. It was evident that the young leading lady had put herself across with the grand dame, and both Mr. Vandeford and Mr. Farraday rejoiced.

"Oh, thank you, Mrs. Farraday, but I have made a professional engagement for Saturday evening. I am going to do a monologue stunt to fill in at the Colonial," Miss Lindsey answered, with pleasure at the invitation shining in her dark eyes.

"Then Dennis can drive down on Sunday and bring you back in time for tea and to see the sunset on the rhododendrons." Mrs. Farraday further surprised her son and Mr. Vandeford by giving this command the imperiousness with which she was accustomed to issue her much-sought-after invitations.

"Great!" exclaimed Mr. Farraday, with the same sort of eager kindness shining in his eyes as Miss Lindsey had met when he had asked her if beefsteak and mushrooms would be the thing for her starvation. The memory of that day made Miss Lindsey's eyes dim as she accepted the invitation, though she had had hope of a last minute chance to do a little Sunday "stunt" for Keith somewhere in subway New York. And Miss Lindsey needed the money, for a hundred dollars doesn't go far in New York even when carried in the pocket of a gown donned in the Y. W. C. A.; but she needed the rhododendrons and the tea more than she needed the material things that the extra fifty picked up at Keith's would have purchased.

"Thank you, Mrs. Farraday, it would be—be 'great' to come that way," Miss Lindsey answered. Both Mr. Vandeford and Mr. Farraday, as well as Miss Adair, were struck with the sudden beauty that illumined Miss Lindsey's dark face as she smiled and quoted Mr. Farraday in her acceptance of his mother's invitation.

"Is or is not little Lindsey a beauty, Denny?" asked Mr. Vandeford, as they drove up-town in the Surreness after depositing the girls at their nunnery.

"I was just wondering," answered Mr. Farraday. "I'm mighty glad she made such a hit with the mater."

"And I'm mighty glad I'm going to lose the author of 'The Purple Slipper' into the wilds of Westchester and the rhododendrons, while I extract her play from Howard and slash it myself and help Rooney to mutilate it further," said Mr. Vandeford.

"Of course you are going to the mater's with Miss Lindsey and me for tea, per usual?" asked Mr. Farraday.

"Can't do it. Got to work on 'The Purple Slipper' while you people frolic. Good-night!" With which refusal and taunt Mr. Vandeford left Mr. Farraday at the door of his apartment-house.

Mr. Farraday looked at his watch as he started away from the curb, found the hour to be eleven o'clock, wabbled the machine first to the right and then to the left, and finally turned down-town, in which direction the Claridge reared its twelve stories of masonry at the corner of Forty-fourth and Sixth.

At about that minute these were the remarks exchanged through the open door that connected two little cell-like rooms at the Y. W. C. A.:

"Aren't you going to bed right away? I'm so sleepy that I'm brushing my face instead of my hair," Miss Adair called to Miss Lindsey. A desperate and continual desire for sleep is the pest that haunts the rural visitor to New York and Miss Adair's young health was easily its prey. She did not readily learn to run on nerves.

"You go to bed; but I've got to let the hem of my tailored linen down two inches, so it will brush against those rhododendrons as a lady's should, and sew up the opening in the neck of my chiffon blouse an inch and a half, so I won't spill any of Mrs. Farraday's tea down it. Good-night!" It goes to say that when Greek meets Vandal or the East meets the West, dents occur.

And, as Mrs. Farraday had commanded, the rhododendron party at West Marsh came to pass, to the vast enjoyment of all present, though Mr. Vandeford's absence was a deprivation to the entire company. And that night their friendly hearts would have ached if they had been able to get a vision of his strenuosity. Godfrey Vandeford, Theatrical Producer, was in full action, and chips from "The Purple Slipper" were flying in all directions.

In his bedroom in the Seventy-third Street apartment, Mr. Vandeford was stripped for the fray—to his silk pajamas—and he lay stretched upon his fumed-oak bed, with both reading-lights turned on full blaze. In his hands was the manuscript of "The Purple Slipper," which Mazie Villines had literally torn from under the hands of Grant Howard to deliver to Mr. Vandeford on Saturday afternoon, just a day later than the time set for its deliverance.

"My check and Grant's down, or no play," she had said upon entering Mr. Vandeford's apartment at about the setting of the Saturday sun. "He's off for a two week's d.t., and I gotter take care of him. Twelve-fifty is the way to write it."

"Six hundred, and not a cent more without Grant's signature," answered Mr. Vandeford. Mr. Adolph Meyers, who was listening to the conversation from the hall from which he had ushered Miss Villines into Mr. Vandeford's library, set a spring-lock on the entrance door of the apartment, and entered the library unobtrusively.

"Twelve-fifty, you old dollar-skinner!" averred the vaudeville star, with a nasty little laugh.

"Don't try to pull off a hold-up, Mazie. It won't work. It's Grant's money," said Mr. Vandeford, with an icy calmness in his voice. And as she spoke he looked at Mr. Adolph Meyers, who answered the look with perfect comprehension.

"Then you'll get the manuscript when hell freezes over or your wad loosens," she again laughed, and this time turned toward the door with the square manila portfolio under her arm.

An interested spectator could not have said afterward just how it did happen that in half a second the manila portfolio was in the hands of Mr. Adolph Meyers, who also bore upon his left cheek a long and profusely bleeding scratch.

"Here's your check, child, and keep a good grip on Grant, so he can't get started toward East River as he did last time," Mr. Vandeford said as he handed an already prepared check to the enraged girl. She was dumb for a second, no longer.

"I was going to leave it for five hundred, you old white-skinned bluffer with your goose-grease, strong arm," she finally blurted out, and in a twinkling of her bright eyes her good-nature had returned. "Say, that is some play now, and I wish you'd let me play a dance girl at that dinner-party. I'd do it refined." There was a queer little appeal in the mobile young face. "I'd like to doll up like a lady."

"I'll think that over, Mazie," answered Mr. Vandeford. "A song and dance from you might go all right."

"Gimme a call, will you? I'll be on the job with my guzzler for a week now. I got to get him past, for he's some meal-ticket when times is dull." As Mazie disposed of the check in her stocking, a degree of affectionate anxiety for the condition of Mr. Grant Howard showed in her face for the fraction of a second, then disappeared as she looked at Mr. Adolph Meyers.

"Come on and get my wad from where I've put it, if you dare, Dolph," she challenged, then laughed, as the imperturbable Mr. Meyers both ignored and showed her to the door with all courtesy.

And as he lay on his bed reading over the Howard manuscript of "The Purple Slipper," which had just returned to him after a twenty-four hour overhauling and annotation for action by Mr. William Rooney, the stage director with the top price, Mr. Vandeford said to Mr. Adolph Meyers, who sat at a table beside the bed, taking down and inserting notes into the manuscript as they sprang from Mr. Vandeford's brain, almost before they got past his lips:

"No wonder Mazie could see herself in this show, Pops! Grant has pepped it up almost to her standard. Whee-ugh!" With this whistle Mr. Vandeford turned page twenty of the first act and handed it over to Mr. Meyers, who began to devour it with eyes that took in almost the whole page at a glance.

"It is a snap-shot of Miss Hawtry he has made, Mr. Vandeford, sir. Mr. Howard has never done better."

"Yes, that's what he intended to do, but I'm going to clean it out a bit. Run an insert of the scene on page five to seven and a half out of Miss Adair's manuscript. It is just as good and a little—little more—say, Pops, cut out seven lines on page fourteen from the second down, and take this from me instead." Mr. Vandeford closed his eyes and dictated a bit of dialogue between two of the minor characters of "The Purple Slipper," which cleared up a point Mr. Howard and Mr. Rooney and the original author had all left at loose ends. As he dictated, Mr. Meyers wrote on the blank page opposite the lines, and made some cabalistic signs for insertion.

Slowly they progressed through the first act, Mr. Vandeford reading from two manuscripts and reconciling Mr. Howard's shaky, pen annotations, Mr. Rooney's blue-pencil, action directions, and Miss Adair's original wanderings from the point with many brilliant returns in quaint dialogue.

"That child has got more brains and uses them less than would seem possible," growled Mr. Vandeford, as he with a few deft lines near the close of the second act got the heroine off the stage and out of an impossible situation in which Miss Adair had involved her.

"It is that her characters talk with interest, but act in awkwardness, Mr. Vandeford, sir. Another good play can be written by Miss Adair," Mr. Meyers said as he put in two lines and a cross star sign.

"God forbid!" ejaculated Mr. Vandeford, in all sincerity. "Here, Pops, get this first act down to those girls waiting in the office. Did you get two for all night, so one could get out the parts? You know Rooney will expect a reading to-morrow before he begins rehearsals."

"It is three girls now waiting at the office for the night, and a messenger in your hall, Mr. Vandeford, sir," answered Mr. Meyers as he gathered up his annotated pages, put them into a new manila portfolio, and rose to take them to the A. D. T. boy asleep on the floor in the hall.

"We haven't rushed in a manuscript like this since 'Dear Geraldine,' have we, Pops?" asked Mr. Vandeford, as he picked up the second act. "It's just nine o'clock, and those girls ought to get through by three A. M. Don't let Steinberg charge up twelve hours on you."

"It will be at eight that they are still working, Mr. Vandeford, sir, and night type-writing means much money," Mr. Meyers answered, as he departed with his package.

"At that we'd better get busy to feed it to 'em," Mr. Vandeford said, as he picked up and began to dig into the pages.

For the three hours ensuing he and his henchman worked with never a hitch in their growls and scratches and muttered exchanges. Then, as they came close to the climax of the last act, Mr. Vandeford sat up from his pillows, which were heated almost beyond endurance with his night lights and his tousled head, and gave forth a roar.

"I'll be hanged if I'll let that scene between Rosalind and her lover go with that filthy twist that Howard has given it! The words are almost the original, but what will Hawtry make of what he's put into it?"

"It will be the worst she makes," answered Mr. Meyers. "But it is for pep very good, Mr. Vandeford, sir, and can be tried out."

"That's right, Pops. I wonder if I am a Broadway producer or—or the czar of a young ladies' seminary," Mr. Vandeford growled as he lay down, and again went to work.

"It is that Miss Adair will not understand it until Miss Hawtry is at work, and before that all may be dead," Mr. Meyers consoled, as he, too, fell upon "The Purple Slipper."

At two-thirty the now soggy A. D. T. received the last manila envelope to deliver to the busy girls down in Mr. Vandeford's office, and that distinguished producer was stretched out on his bed in cool darkness while Mr. Meyers was in a subway nodding his way up to his humble room on One Hundred and Sixteenth Street.

"If I live through seeing her past the reading of the blamed thing to-morrow, I'll be stronger than I think I am," Mr. Vandeford murmured as he felt the calmness of sleep fall upon him.



CHAPTER VI

Rehearsals for "The Purple Slipper" had been called positively for September first, and the response became unanimous at about fifteen minutes to eleven at the Barrett Theater on West Forty-sixth Street; that is, it was unanimous except for the presence of the author and the angel—Miss Adair and Mr. Farraday—and Miss Violet Hawtry, the star, who never came to first readings until the whole cast was assembled and could be impressed with the fact that she came and went as she listed.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I take it that you all know one another—and Mr. William Rooney," said Mr. Vandeford, as he took a seat at the left of a table placed in the center of the stage just beyond the footlights. Mr. Rooney marched to a place beside him, and rapped with a large black pencil for attention from the groups into which the dozen members of the cast had fallen after mutual introductions and greetings.

"Everybody grab a seat that is good enough to glue to for five hours while Fido here gives out your parts," commanded Mr. Rooney, without in any way acknowledging Mr. Vandeford's introduction to the company. Mr. Rooney's voice was low and rich, and had the precision and decision of a machine-gun in its utterances. With hurried obedience the entire company looked about the stage for seats.

Miss Bebe Herne, though having fifty pounds the advantage of any of the others in avoirdupois, was the first seated. She merely dropped down upon a stout pine bench, the front of which was stuccoed to represent antique marble, and peremptorily motioned Mr. Wallace Kent to that portion of the seat left after she had wedged herself as far to one side as possible. Mr. Kent obeyed immediately, though he had just placed a rickety, stuffed chair beside the gold one occupied by Miss Blanche Grayson, the glowerer. Miss Lindsey sat on the end of an overturned box hedge before a drop curtain of a twilight night, and Mr. Reginald Leigh sat in a wicker chair under a brilliant canvas flowering shrub of no known variety. The rest of the company were soon seated and receiving the small, blue-backed, manuscript books from the pale young man whom Mr. Rooney always addressed as Fido.

"Everybody here but Miss Hawtry," said Mr. Rooney, and he glared at Mr. Vandeford as though that gentleman must be concealing the star in the pocket of his gray, silk-crash coat.

"And Miss Hawtry is here also," came in a very beautifully modulated voice from left stage, as the tardy star came down center, and stood directly in front of the table at which sat the producer and his stage-manager. Mr. Vandeford rose immediately and said good-morning; Mr. Rooney kept his seat and looked Miss Hawtry through and through with a cold reproof.

"Five minutes late," he said with an edge in the words that cut.

"I really beg your pardon, and it shall not happen—" the star was beginning to say in an apologetic tone, which bent under the cold edge of the assault, as Mr. Vandeford had hoped it would, when Mr. Rooney cut it off with a curt command to pale Fido.

"Give out the Hawtry part."

Miss Hawtry accepted the little blue booklet handed her by Fido, and also Mr. Vandeford's chair, placed carefully in the center of the stage for her. The first brush between Mr. Rooney and Miss Hawtry had been pulled off and he had won, much to Mr. Vandeford's delight. For "Miss Cut-up" he had had to hire, pay for, and fire, three successive stage-managers, and she had managed all three. Mr. Rooney's boast was that no star had ever managed him and that he had successfully staged every play he had undertaken; hence a spectacular salary. Also he felt that his reputation was at stake in the Hawtry duel, and he was determined to back his own method.

"Scene first, act first; Betty Carrington is discovered on stage. Go to it, Betty!" he commanded as Fido took a seat at the end of the table, opened a copy of the first act, and sat ready for annotations.

"How beautiful the morning is and—" the glowering Miss Blanche Grayson was beginning to read from her cerulean booklet, when an interruption occurred.

Miss Adair and Mr. Farraday entered from the stage door.

Mr. Vandeford looked at Mr. Rooney, and muttered under his breath: "Angel and author, Bill. Easy!"

"Shoot," answered Mr. Rooney, in a mild undertone, though he glared at the company as though in a cold rage.

"Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to Miss Adair, the author of our play. You have all of you met Mr. Farraday. Mr. Rooney, our stage-director, Miss Adair and Mr. Farraday." Mr. Vandeford made the introductions as rapidly as possible and in a voice of such coolness that Miss Adair looked at him in astonishment and then at the assembled company with great timidity. With special trepidation did she regard Mr. Rooney, who had bobbed his scrubby, black-mopped head at her with no expression at all in his little black eyes, while he refused to see Mr. Farraday's offered hand.

"Have seats in the left stage-box," he directed them in the same tone of voice with which he had quelled Miss Hawtry. "Now, get going there, Betty Carrington, and open again."

Mr. Vandeford led Miss Adair and Mr. Farraday out into the wings in a roundabout path to the left stage-box, and paused with them out of sight of Mr. Rooney. Then the humanity came back into his face and voice as he spoke to his friends in an undertone.

"Rooney is the genius among stage-directors, but he's the original and genuine Tartar. How are you both?" As he asked the question he held out a hand to each of them, and his smile held the cordiality to which they were both accustomed.

"We had a blow-out on Riverside Drive, and that's what makes us late. Now I've got to take the car around to the garage," Mr. Farraday apologized, as he rumpled his leonine mane, fanned himself with his hat, and departed.

Miss Adair fairly clung to the hand of friendship offered her, with relief that it had not been withdrawn forever, as she had feared from the coolness of Mr. Vandeford's greeting before the assembled company of "The Purple Slipper."

"I'm afraid," she murmured with both alarm and amusement sparkling in her gray eyes, in which Mr. Vandeford found himself searching for a certain expression with the eagerness with which he always looked for it after even a brief separation from his author. It was there and undimmed. "Let's go sit down where he told us to," Miss Adair whispered.

"Good girl!" laughed Mr. Vandeford as he led the way to the left stage-box to which Mr. Rooney had summarily banished the author and the angel. He seated Miss Adair at the front edge of the box and took the chair close at her left. She was thus bulwarked and buttressed for any assault that might be hurled her way. It came in a very few minutes.

Miss Bebe Herne and Miss Mildred Lindsey were in the midst of reading an animated dialogue on page five by the time Miss Adair's attention was firmly riveted on the stage and the reading in progress. Fortunately the little scene was of her own writing. Mr. Vandeford had put it back into the play instead of the paraphrase Mr. Howard had made of it, and he was surprised to find how deeply grateful he was to himself for having given her this bit as he watched the home-made color rise under the gray eyes as the author sat and heard her written words come to life in a little bit of really sparkling character comedy, which both Miss Lindsey and experienced Bebe were acting as well as reading in such a way as to bring out all the charm of the lines. The happiness of both author and producer lasted about two minutes, then it was broken into by Mr. William Rooney with a crash.

"Nuff, there, nuff!" he commanded, in the midst of a quaint epigram, which Bebe was delivering with unction. "Audiences don't want to hear smart babble after their seats are all down. They want to see the star and get going. Cut in Miss Hawtry at the second set-to of Harriet and aunt. Take it this way: 'And my dear Rosalind has said, Harriet—' Enter Rosalind with the line you have there."

"Yes, it's time for me to get on and—" Miss Hawtry was agreeing complacently, when she was quickly snapped off in her remark.

"Line, Miss Hawtry, not gab," Mr. Rooney commanded.

Instantly Miss Hawtry was reading from her lines and faithful Fido was making annotations upon his manuscript with strokes that spelled finality to the stricken author, who raised her protesting eyes to the producer of her play.

"Steady now," Mr. Vandeford whispered. "This is the first reading, and he's setting. We can't side-track him now. Later you can—" but the author's attention was caught by the dialogue between Miss Hawtry and Bebe, which was the first full dose of the Howard fifteen-hundred-dollar, inebriate, but very brilliant and Hawtry-like, "pep."

"Oh, I didn't write that at all!" she whispered, as she fairly shrank against Mr. Vandeford's strength of mind, if not against the strength of his arm that he had laid across the back of her chair.

"Just sit still and listen to-day as though it were somebody else's play, and we will talk it over afterward. You know I—I warned you," he whispered with soothing tenderness, his lips almost against her ear in the dusk of the box.

"I promised, and I will," she answered him, and he was at a loss to know if she really did flutter to him a fraction of an inch as he had suspected her of doing in his car on the night of her debut on Broadway. The charm of Kentucky girls is composed of many illusions and realities, which they themselves hardly understand, and use by hereditary instinct.

And with her proud head poised in all stateliness, Miss Patricia Adair sat for five solid hours and heard "The Purple Slipper," nee "The Renunciation of Rosalind," read from first to last page by the people who were to present it to the public; and Mr. Vandeford found his heart bleeding for the thrusts into hers. Not a protest did she make, but the roses faded and the gray eyes sank far back behind their black defending lashes, and they were glittering with suppressed tears as the wearied company rose to its feet after the last line.

"Here to-morrow at eleven sharp," were Mr. Rooney's words of dismissal as he and Fido followed the company in their hurried exit toward the stage-door, with not so much as a glance at the box in which sat the stricken author.

And there alone, off the dismal and dismantled stage in the cool dusk of the box, producer and author faced each other and the situation.

"If my grandfather were not—not—dying, I'd take it right home and burn it all up!" were the first words the author of "The Purple Slipper" gave utterance to, after the last echo of the last footstep had died off the stage.

"You couldn't, you've sold it to—to me," Mr. Vandeford answered with a coolness in his voice that restored her mental balance, as he had intended it should. "Now answer me truly; is it or is it not a good play?"

"It's not my play; it's horrid and vulgar!" the author stormed, with lightning burning up the tears in her gray eyes.

"That whole situation is exactly as you wrote it, and about a third of the lines are yours, or will be yours by the time it is at the first night, if you play the game. I have not decided whether I think it is a good play or not. If I think it isn't, you may have it and burn it up. I don't know what Rooney thinks yet. If he doesn't want to go on, I won't." Mr. Vandeford had known the women of many climes, and he found himself using that experience on Miss Adair with great skill, though it hurt him to do so.

"Part of it I don't even understand," Miss Adair continued to storm, and Mr. Vandeford was about to discover that either a Blue-grass woman or horse, with the bit in their respective mouths, is mighty apt to go a pace before curbed. "What was that scene in the last act just before the dinner-party? She read so fast and he had his back to me, so I suppose that is the reason I didn't get it." Miss Adair was alluding to the scene whose vulgarity Mr. Vandeford had wished to sacrifice, but which Mr. Meyers had pleaded for on account of its extra dash of "pep" exactly suited to the Hawtry style.

"You won't be able to judge the Hawtry scenes at all until the opening night," Mr. Vandeford answered, positively quaking in his boots for fear that Miss Adair would force him to an elucidation of the scene, which was mostly of the cleverest innuendo. "She is a miserable study, and she and Height rehearse the big scenes alone. She just walks through with the company. Truly, you can hardly judge anything of what a play will be from just a reading or from any rehearsal. Please trust me and help me as you promised you would."

"But the play isn't mine, at all! My play is—is killed—and dead, and murdered." Miss Adair persisted, still writhing from the butchery.

"It is your play; but granting that it isn't, at all, think what it will mean to all of us if this—this nobody's play succeeds. Think what it will mean to the actors in the company. Miss Lindsey was hungry when she got her first advance on your play, and Bebe Herne hasn't had a part that suited her so well in years. If it goes she ought to have enough to make her easy; and she is getting old now—"

"If you'll say and tell everybody that the play isn't mine, of course I'll help you, and—" Miss Adair agreed, with the tears dried by the anger and a degree of sanity returning at Mr. Vandeford's skilful appeal to her generosity, which he made when he saw that his attempt to bluff her about calling off the play had failed. Mr. William Rooney came into the box. His hat was tilted on the back of his head and in the corner of his mouth was a large cigar, which he was chewing and not smoking. He seated himself without invitation and spoke with his usual abruptness:

"That play is a hummer, Vandeford, if I can just make the dolts put it across. It is a genuine Hawtry vehicle, but in a new vein. It's a corking situation and yet rings true. Did any old dame really have the spunk to put that dinner-party across on both lover and husband that you've got in your play, miss?" As Mr. Rooney asked the question of Miss Adair, it was the first time that he had seemed aware of the existence of the author of "The Purple Slipper."

"It's not my play, Mr. Rooney," Miss Adair said haughtily to the thick-skinned genius. "That—that situation is—was—is true, however."

"Then it's your play all right!" declared Mr. Rooney. "The situation is all there is to any play. The staging is the rest. Anybody can put in good lines. Any simp can doll up the actors in costumes, and one actor can put the ideas across pretty near as good as any other, if he's directed all right; but when it's done, the play is the man's or woman's who made the first layout of the idea—and what the stage-manager does to it. Author and stage manager, I say. The rest is easy."

"That's what I've been telling Miss Adair," Mr. Vandeford eagerly assented.

"And authors ought to go off and die until the first night, too," Mr. Rooney continued to say. "When I staged 'Only Annie' for E. and K., I told that author if he came on my stage any more at rehearsals I would biff him one in the nutt, and I meant it, too. His thinks and mine ran into each other so bad that I was near crazed."

"But an author writes a play and he or she knows—" Miss Adair was beginning to say to Mr. Rooney with kind patience, when he interrupted her as he rose to take his departure.

"The author oughter write all he knows and let it go at that," he said as he spat on the carpet of the box with no sign of compunction. "The stage-manager can do the rest." And with no form of leave-taking he departed.

"And the American drama has to be filtered through that sort of—of illiteracy?" Miss Adair turned and demanded of Mr. Vandeford.

"The American drama is often written by people who have been too closely associated with books on a library shelf, so that it needs to be filtered through a little gross humanity to get across to—humanity in the gross, which pays to see it. If a scholar writes and produces a play scholars go to see it all right, but all the scholars in America only fill one theater twice, and then what is to become of scholar and wife and children, as well as producer, manager, and theater-owner?" Mr. Vandeford spoke slowly, choosing his words.

"Aren't any of the stage-managers educated gentlemen?" demanded Miss Adair, with an interest that was fast becoming impersonal, for she had the wit to see that in some ways Mr. Vandeford's summary of the situation between author and stage-manager was sound.

"Yes, a few, but not the most successful ones," answered Mr. Vandeford. "I tell you truly that a stage-manager has to be a genius to succeed. He must be a man with a vision and sheer brutality enough to put the vision that he gets from his conception of the play he is producing into twenty other mentalities and make them present the play as a harmonious whole to an audience. He cannot be a respecter of persons while he is pounding, and he must not be interfered with or his vision is obscured and the play loses. Do you see what I mean?"

"Then an author ought to produce his own plays," Miss Adair decided very promptly.

"Yes," answered Mr. Vandeford, with a whimsical smile down into the eager, pale, intensely creative face raised to his. "When an author is born who will study years until he is an expert electrician, other years in great studios until he can paint scenery that is a work of art, delve into old books until he knows costuming of thousands of periods in hundreds of lands and how to sketch it, then gives himself to the studying of stagecraft and the writing of half a hundred plays until he writes one that is really great; after which, if he has the strength and the nerves to produce that play, we will all go to see the great human drama. That is, if he has had time to live with and in the hearts of people so as to supply that gross sympathy with the masses who buy tickets which Rooney got while climbing out of the gutter. God grant he comes some day to America—but you are not he!"

"No, I'm not," admitted Miss Adair, with her eyes smiling back into his whimsically, "but what you say makes me see that the—the producer—you are the whole thing. You get it all—me and Mr. Rooney and Miss Hawtry together and pound us into—into a play. I make that acknowledgment."

"If you ask the stage-manager he will say that the success of a play is his; the costumer will claim that success; the star knows it is his or hers, and the lead is sure that it is due to the support; the author surely has some claim to draw the huge royalties, and the location of his theater makes the theater-owner know that any play in that theater will go. Yes, the producer will always claim the whole show if it all goes well. If it fails the show then belongs entirely to the producer, who picked it in its manuscript stage, and he is no good as a producer. If he fails a few times hand-running, to the scrap heap with him!"

"But you've never failed," Miss Adair exclaimed, with a dart of fear in her eyes.

"My last show, 'Miss Cut-up,' was a flivver all right, though we just saved our faces. But I've got a show now that will put me in electric light for two years hand-running and—" Mr. Vandeford was in a panic as he realized that he was going so far in that curious thinking out loud to Miss Adair that he had been about to launch forth on "The Rosie Posie Girl" to her. It would have been like telling a friend the plans of his own funeral with enthusiasm, as it would be obvious to her that Hawtry would have to fail in and drop "The Purple Slipper" before becoming the triumphant "Rosie Posie Girl."

"I'm willing to—to let them cut my play all up if—if it will really run two years and make your reputation more brilliant than it is," Miss Adair said, interrupting his pause of consternation at his near betrayal of his plans. She spoke with the worshipful uplift of her gray eyes to his that had betrayed him in the first place to such a confusion of schemes. "If it added anything to it, I would even be willing to let you put the Adair name to the vulgar thing they read here to-day, but it wouldn't help it anywhere except in Louisville and Cincinnati and Nashville and Atlanta and New Orleans and Richmond. People don't know us in New York, and any name will do here; so mine won't—won't have to be disgraced."

"Please don't say that!" pleaded Mr. Vandeford with consternation in his soul as he thought of the development of the Howard "pep" Hawtry would make as the rehearsals of "The Purple Slipper" progressed. "It is the same thing with Miss Hawtry as it is with Mr. Rooney; she has a—a kind of gutter drag that gets across to the multitude, and of course your play had to be—be fitted to her. Hawtry, to be Hawtry, has to do and say things that you couldn't write at all, that you couldn't very well understand; but they'll get the crowd going and coming. Please give me your promise again to sit tight and see it through—or go home and leave it all to me." Mr. Vandeford was surprised to feel how hard his heart beat, and he was afraid that it sounded like the echo of an anvil chorus in the big empty theater.

"I never have to give promises a second time, and this is the last time I am ever going to cry out," Miss Adair answered him, with a lift to her proud little head. "I am going to stay right here and help if I can, and learn. But I won't in any way distress or—or trouble you. Please don't get me on your mind!"

"I won't get you on my mind," Mr. Vandeford answered out loud—"because I've got you in my heart, poor kiddie," he continued to himself, in a kind of desperation.

Mr. Dennis Farraday burst in upon the dusk of the theater and the tragedy of the situation. He was vastly excited and he waved a letter in his hand.

"Oh, you Patricia Adair, why didn't you tell me that you are old Roger Adair's sister?" he demanded.

"Why, what do you mean about Roger? Do you know—"

"Do I know him? Just listen to this, will you, and here I've not been handing you around on a silver salver for two weeks!" He then read the following letter aloud to Miss Adair and Mr. Vandeford:

Adairville, Kentucky.

DEAR DENNY:

Well, here I am! I'm the Captain of my county in the Army of the Furrows, and hope to turn in many thousand pounds of food stuffs for you people in New York to live on. In the meantime Miss Patricia Adair, my sister, is going to New York to see to the putting on of a play she has written for one Mr. Godfrey Vandeford. She is the greatest girl ever, and you stay right on the job seeing that things go right for her while I plant these potatoes to keep you from starving. She will be at the Y. W. C. A. and will sleep and eat safe enough, but you look out for her and don't let her get homesick. If she needs me, of course I will come, but she's a plucky child and you are the best ever, so I'll go on ploughing with a free mind. Let me know how it all goes. What sort of a chap is that Vandeford?

Yours as always and forever, ROGER.

"Can you beat it?" demanded good Dennis, with a blaze of friendship in his eyes as he regarded Miss Patricia Adair. "It was forwarded from my old office number to my new, to Westchester to Nantucket, back to my office, and finally arrived this morning. I've just sent Roger a thousand-word telegram, and I hope he never knows that I was off the job ten days. Give that child here to me, Van, and go get a report on your character for me before you look at her again. Roger Adair is the best friend I've got on earth, next to you, and you'd better watch your step."

"I like his steps," Miss Adair said, and again Mr. Vandeford felt uncertain as to that curious little flutter that was like a nestling of which he felt he was never to be certain and which Mr. Farraday did not seem to observe at all.

"Didn't you know that Roger was turning you over to me, young lady? Why have you side-stepped me?" Mr. Farraday demanded of the young author, in a voice of great severity.

"I thought that Roger was going to write to a Mr. Denny about me; and I didn't write to him that Mr. Denny hadn't come to take care of me because—because I was afraid he'd leave his work and come up to look after me himself. I didn't remember the Farraday part of your name at all. Roger always said 'Denny.'"

"Well, I suppose I'll have to accept that excuse, as it sounds fairly reasonable; but I'd like to know, Van, why you have been keeping my child here in this musty old theater until past luncheon time when she must be both tired and hungry. Come out to Claremont to luncheon, both of you, this minute," Mr. Farraday both questioned and commanded, with pure delight in his voice and manner. "I'll go run the car around to the door, so you won't have to walk in the sun." And he departed as quickly as he had come.

That night Mr. Vandeford lay stretched on his bed in a dark coolness, with his hands clasped over his eyes, when Mr. Farraday came in with his latch-key at twelve-thirty.

"Denny?" he asked from the darkness as Mr. Farraday was tiptoeing past his open door, through which the southern sea-breeze was pouring, "'What sort of chap is that Vandeford?'"

"The telegram I sent read, 'the best ever.'"

"Are you competent to judge me?"

"I am."

"Good-night!"

For an hour before this masculine version of a scene a feminine real thing was being conducted in the two little dotted-muslin-curtained cells at the Y. W. C. A. Miss Adair was telling Miss Lindsey "all about it," and sparks and tears both were in the atmosphere. The explosion was brought on by Miss Lindsey remarking to Miss Adair:

"You know, honey lady, that play of yours is simply ripping, but it is not at all like—like what I thought it would be from hearing you and Mr. Farraday tell it."

"It's not my play at all; it's Mr. Vandeford's. He got somebody to fit it to Miss Hawtry," replied Miss Adair, calmly, as she began to brush her dark, sleek mane.

"What do you mean?" demanded Miss Lindsey, in astonishment.

"He just took the dinner situation in my play and got a man to make a new one out of it that is—is vulgar enough to appeal to the New York theater-goers. He let everybody put in anything they wanted to, instead of what I wrote. He left in a little of mine to compliment me. It's all right, because nobody would have gone to see my play if anybody goes to see—see his." Miss Adair went on calmly with the fifty-third stroke on her raven tresses, but her eyes were beginning to blaze.

"Mr. Vandeford's a complete fool," was on the tip of Miss Lindsey's tongue, but she remembered her main chance, which was the favor of Mr. Godfrey Vandeford, and said instead: "I wish you would let me see a copy of the play as you wrote it. Have you one?"

"I have, in my trunk, and I'll read it to you," answered Miss Adair, and in defensive pride she produced a copy of "The Purple Slipper," which bore the unexpurgated title of "The Renunciation of Rosalind," and proceeded to read it to Miss Lindsey, with both fire and tragedy in her voice.

The operation occupied the two hours before midnight, and Miss Lindsey lay prostrate when it was finished.

"Now, what do you think?" demanded Miss Adair.

"I wish I could have had the making of it over, and for myself instead of Hawtry. That's no play as it stands, but there is a dandy one to be worked up from it that you—you—that would be like you," was the reply that Miss Lindsey gave as she looked out into distance, with glowing eyes.

"Do you think that—that horrid play will be a success?" asked Miss Adair, with her voice sparkling.

"I do," answered Miss Lindsey. "And it is curious that with all its changes it is still—still yours. There is a lot more of your stuff left than you realize, and the turns that—that Mr. Vandeford's playwright has given it are very clever. Lots of times he's just paraphrased your lines into Hawtryites. It will be interesting to see how much of you is left when we all come out of the wash for the first night."

"I wish I were dead and buried!" she was surprised to hear Miss Adair confess, and there then ensued a downpour, which the hardier Western girl weathered for very love of the young Southern tempest in her arms.

"I suppose I ought to go home, out of the way, but I'm going to stay and—and learn—and write another one all by myself," she finally sobbed, with returning courage, thus comforting herself with the resolve which every playwright who ever built a play has used to keep from going entirely mad during the rehearsals of his first play.

"Just try to live until the New York opening, and then see how you feel. That is the way actors do to keep going during the awful grilling of the rehearsals and the road try-out," advised Miss Lindsey, with great soothing.

"I will," promised Miss Adair, and turned her face on her pillow, to sleep, while Miss Lindsey took herself and her jar of cold-cream into her own cell.

"I wish I had a chance at that play! What'll she do when she sees Hawtry and Height really in action in some of those scenes?" she murmured into her own pillow.

The next morning Miss Adair rose, donned a most lovely home-spun linen gown, which was of an old ivory hue and which had been spun upon the looms of her great-great-great grandmother by that lady's slaves, crowned this toilet with the floppy hat covered with crushed roses she and Miss Lindsey and Mr. Farraday had purchased, and reported herself about an hour late at the rehearsals of "The Purple Slipper," whose authorship she had repudiated. She seated herself in the dusk of the left stage-box and bared her breast for blows. They came fast and furious, but other breasts and heads beside her own suffered. Mr. William Rooney was in full action. The entire company was on the stage in the midst of the last ensemble bit in the first act, all talking and acting with blue booklets of lines in their hands.

"Here you, Mr. Kent," roared Mr. Rooney as he rose from behind his table, at one side of which sat faithful Fido annotating his copy of the manuscript, "make up to that old lady like she was the last ham sandwich extinct and you knew you were going to be fed on alfalfa the rest of your life. Get her going, man, get her going! She's an old fool, and you know it, but you've got to have her plantation and slaves. You can keep a chorus-girl car in the garage if you just get her well fooled. Fool along, fool along!"

"'I will write the message to your son, Madam Carrington, and dispatch it forthwith by one of my own black boys. Is my hand not ever ready for your service and my wit—and also my heart?'" declaimed Mr. Kent with satisfactory fervor, as he kissed Miss Herne's fat white hand.

"Now blob, Miss Herne, blob!" directed Mr. Rooney, coming entirely from behind the table. "You are the fool of this show and don't let anybody get that away from you."

"'I pray a blessing on your excellent friendship, Judge Cheneworth, and I will rest me content in—'" Miss Herne answered in a most excellent imitation of the helplessness of an old grand dame.

"Break in there, Miss Lindsey, break in!" raved Mr. Rooney. "'Content in' is your cue. Grab it. Remember you are just the sister and only in the play to swell the list of actors on the program, so grab and keep a-grabbing if you want a place on the salary list. Now, everybody on at Miss Lindsey's lines and break up this drivel between the old birds."

"'Mother, Rosalind bids me say to you that—'"

"Crowd on everybody, crowd on, and keep things going! It will be nine o'clock by now, and we'll have to begin to feed the audience the hugging by a quarter to ten or they will go out and look elsewhere.—Say, Mr. Leigh, are your feet mates? You don't handle 'em even."

Miss Adair rose and stole from the box to the stage-door, and looked up and down the street to see if Mr. Vandeford was approaching. She felt that she could not stand more alone. He was nowhere in sight, and she decided to walk around the block and see if the sun at ninety degrees would warm her chill. After this journey she returned to her post and found the box still empty. Mr. Vandeford had not arrived nor had Mr. Farraday, but she seated herself resolutely. She was just in time to witness a pitched battle between Miss Hawtry and Mr. Rooney.

"If you are determined to walk through the scenes, Miss Hawtry, do it awake and not asleep!" stormed Mr. Rooney.

"Very well," answered Miss Hawtry, but Miss Adair's heart warmed to her as she noted the contemptuousness in her manner directed toward her stage-manager.

"Now see here, Height, you know that you want to get away with this woman before her husband gets back. You can't do it with kid gloves on. Spit on your hands, man, and grab her by the hair. You say: 'Rosalind, a strong man's love is a weapon which a woman can easily turn against herself with deadly outcome,' like you were begging her to go with you over to Ligget's for an ice-cream soda with crushed strawberries. Say it this way." And as she sat astounded Miss Adair heard a line that she had written in a sympathetic fervor of imagination and which was perhaps her favorite in the whole play, uttered by Mr. William Rooney with the most exquisite and manly feeling, while his homely, vulgar face and body were transformed into the same exquisiteness. A breathless happiness descended upon her, and she waited in it to hear the beautiful Mr. Gerald Height give utterance to it with the same art. Miss Hawtry brought her to earth.

"Mr. Rooney," she said with an utter lack of appreciation or comprehension of the bit of high art that had flashed upon her, "it is in my contract with Mr. Vandeford that I rehearse my scenes alone with my support until the dress rehearsal."

"Yes, I might have judged that from 'Miss Cut-up,'" Mr. Rooney answered her with a blow straight from his shoulder. "Give little sister her cue, Height, and let her run on to rescue you. God knows you need it!"

"Mr. Rooney, I'll have you understand—" Miss Hawtry came to the center to continue her tirade, when Mr. Rooney struck the decisive blow.

"Everybody on and begin the scene over!" he commanded right past the enraged star. "Take it up, Kent, with Miss Herne at 'I will write the message to your son,' and get her going, get her going!"

At this forceful command the machinery of "The Purple Slipper" was set in motion, and swept Miss Hawtry off center and into her place for the time being.

And despite herself Miss Adair was fascinated in watching the machine grind away, with now and then a spark from Mr. Rooney that took fire in the very core of her heart or brain or solar plexus—wherever "The Renunciation of Rosalind" had been conceived. Miss Adair did not know what it was that thus affected her, but she had got hold of her end of the psychic cord along which the author feeds the hostile stage-manager in such a manner that on the first night of a successful play they can say to each other with clasped hands and wet eyes, "Well done!"

And while Miss Adair sat under the spell of Mr. Rooney, Mr. Vandeford sat in his big chair in his office and fought a battle for "The Purple Slipper" that resulted in a draw that filled him with anxiety.

"I can find only one open booking in New York for October first, Mr. Vandeford, sir," Mr. Meyers was saying, with trouble settled in a cloud upon his broad brow. "I have it fairly good for the road for 'The Purple Slipper' until October first, and then it is a jump to Toronto or Minneapolis, which is into the grave."

"I suppose that one opening on Broadway is Weiner's New Carnival Theater," Mr. Vandeford asked as though the question were useless.

"You have it right," answered Mr. Meyers. "Still, Mr. Vandeford, sir, it is always failures that leave Broadway openings into which road shows can jump."

"Until last year, yes, Pops, but now New York is so full of people with munition and war-contract money in their pockets that any show, no matter how rotten, that gets in a Broadway theater plays to capacity and stays. They'd go to 'The Old District Skule' because the doors were open and there is no other place to go. What are we going to do?"

"I advise that you see Mr. Breit and trust to some very big failure to give you a place. It is that he will always give you a preference," answered Mr. Meyers with little hope, but determination.

"Yes, Breit will let me in if there is a squeezing chance, but Breit doesn't own a theater, nor do I, or you, Pops; and I don't blame the fellows who do own them for filling them with their own cheap companies and plays so as to get their buckets under the whole golden stream. Why give money away to any independent producer?"

"Mr. Breit said that he had news that Mr. Weiner would open that New Carnival with a Hilliard show, name not given," Mr. Meyers added to the information already prepared for Mr. Vandeford.

"I'll see goose-grease frying out of him in Inferno before he gets it," said Mr. Vandeford, coolly. "I know that is his game, but I'll put across this 'Purple Slipper' with Hawtry and keep my 'Rosie Posie Girl' until I get good and ready to let her play it. Then I'll produce it to the tune of a half-million dollars and not Mr. Weiner. I've never been squeezed, and I'm not going to have this rotten game beat me. I'll go over and see Breit and he'll jockey me a corner on Broadway, somehow. Back at three." And Mr. Vandeford walked out of his office as coolly as though not sizzling inwardly with anxiety.

"I've got you next on the booking of about four-fifths of the theaters on Broadway, Van," said Mr. Breit, the booking king, as he and Mr. Vandeford smoked leisurely cigars in his big, cool office. "You should worry! E. and K. and S. and Z. are bound to pick some flivvers and in you go. Loaf on the road and lose money like a little man."

"My contract expires with Hawtry if I don't present her on Broadway by September fifteenth."

"That is a bit of a pickle! But she won't have any show to jump into, and she'll compromise with you; won't she?"

"She'll have to," Mr. Vandeford declared. "Coming down to Atlantic City to see 'The Purple Slipper' open two weeks from Monday, September twenty-third?"

"I'll be there. Rooney says it is a go; says little genius amateur wrote it and Grant Howard 'pepped' it. That right?"

"Yes. By!"

An hour later, in the coolness and seclusion of the grill room of The Monks, Mr. Vandeford was imparting his predicament to his partner in the venture and adventures of "The Purple Slipper."

"And you are worrying about whether Miss Hawtry will stay by us for the few weeks we'll have to loaf on the road or even close while waiting for the New York opening?" questioned Mr. Farraday. "Say, aren't you a bit unjust in your judgment of her, Van?"

"I know the whole tribe of actors, and you don't, Denny," answered Mr. Vandeford, over a tall glass of iced tea he was drinking; he didn't know exactly why, but the habit had grown on him lately.

"Then why not try to put her under contract for those few indefinite weeks?" suggested Mr. Farraday, over his cup of hot coffee.

"You talk as though we were dealing with sane people," answered Mr. Vandeford. "She's got us and she'll keep us guessing up to the last minute, and then put some kind of screws on. I have got to figure out the likely ones, to see what I can do to jam them."

"Well, anyway, ask her. I think she'll stand by us. I know she will," said Mr. Farraday, with both faith and conviction in his voice. "You do her an injustice, I say!"

"I'm not going to make her any request or offer, Denny. I can't," said Mr. Vandeford, as he looked at the ice floating in his glass of tea.

"Of course," assented Mr. Farraday, with pained sympathy in his big voice. "Would you like me to sound her out?"

"It's half your show; go ahead. She probably knows the situation and has made her plans for the squeeze or double-cross, but you might try her out," consented Mr. Vandeford, with a shrewd glance at Mr. Farraday. "But I wish you wouldn't, Denny," he added, with a sudden glow of affection in his eyes. Then he was restrained from further remonstrance with Mr. Farraday by the thought of the author of "The Purple Slipper" and her plucky sticking by the play through the thick and thin of her disapproval of it. Again he offered up his big Jonathan as a sacrifice in hopes of improving the prospects of "The Purple Slipper."

Mr. Farraday took Miss Hawtry into his confidence about the predicament of finding a New York theater for his play, "The Purple Slipper," that very evening, out on the veranda of the Beach Inn, where he had motored her by request for dinner after her fatiguing rehearsals, which she had made still more fatiguing for Mr. William Rooney.

"And Van sent you to ask me if I was going to stick by?" she asked, with an effective quaver in her voice.

"He felt that we had no right to—to tie you up for indefinite weeks," said Mr. Farraday, constructing and temporizing at the same time.

"Did you think as little of me as he did?"

"No, by George, I knew you'd stick by us, and I said so!" Mr. Farraday exploded with genuine emotion.

"Thank you. You know me after these few weeks better than he does after all these years of—" And the Violet bent her head on Mr. Farraday's nearest arm and began to weep softly. They were in a secluded corner of the veranda of the Inn, and the Violet raged at herself for having closed the complete seclusion of Highcliff for herself and her purposes by renting it to the Trevors when she had gone to town to the rehearsals of "The Purple Slipper."

And as good Dennis Farraday had no valid reason, either within or without the law for not doing so, he put consoling and comforting arms about her, and exposed his wide, silk-garbed shoulder to the rain of her tears, which were not really raining. In his big heart there was the same comforting for this conspirator as there would have been for Mr. Vandeford's lawful widow, and he administered it with the same affectionate respect that he would have used to the relict.

"You're a dear, wonderful little woman!" he was saying, when the voice of the Clyde Trevors was heard calling to them from around the veranda, and an oath rose in the Violet with such force that she almost allowed it to explode. Still she felt sure of her ultimate results.

"You can count on me to stand by you and the play forever," she promised, and the hurried pressure of their lips in the soft, dark, sea-perfumed air was biologically inevitable.

Mr. Godfrey Vandeford had woven a tangled web when he had let fall the purple letter on the purple manuscript and gone out recklessly to follow the hunch their juxtaposition implied.



CHAPTER VII

The first two weeks of September spent in torrid New York were a strange period of time to have projected itself into the calm life of Miss Patricia Adair of Adairville, Kentucky. Suddenly she found herself a cog screwed tight into a rapid-fire piece of machinery that was running at top speed night and day, by name, "The Purple Slipper."

For long hours she sat in the coolness of that stage-box and held her breath while she threw her whole self into the building of the play, which so fascinatingly was and was not hers. And through all those hours, close at her side, between her and the big dim theater, sat Mr. Godfrey Vandeford, with his arm across the back of her chair and his eager face close to hers and tilted at the same angle. Her slightest murmur or his lowest whisper caught and was answered, and they almost seemed to be breathing one breath, so absorbed were they in the destiny of their mutual adventure. Like all women of her kind, Patricia Adair had known men only through a cloud, which sex traditions had firmly held between her and them, and Godfrey Vandeford was the first man she had encountered since she had slipped outside of its deadening density into a world where men and women endeavored together first, and left their sentinel undertakings to a fitting secondary time and place. In all sincerity she accepted him as a co-worker and was as happy working with him as it was possible for a woman to be. She specially liked being beside him in the office, and watched him settle the details of the running the big machine smoothly, from the hiring of the property-man to the firing of three successive stage-carpenters.

"Real eats, Mr. Vandeford?" the former had inquired one morning.

"Brown-bread turkey, nice and tasty, good crackers, but soda-pop and so forth for booze. Remember, they've got to face it, we hope, many weeks; don't turn their stomachs so they'll all gag."

"I see, sir, I see. I fed 'Maple Leaves' for two years, and they all et every night and gimme a purse when it closed to go to London."

"Goes!"

"Brown-bread turkey sounds nice. I'm hungry," said Miss Adair, as the good-providing property-man departed.

"Pop is going to bring us a piece of pie and a bottle of milk from the automat," answered Mr. Vandeford, as he began putting busy stabs with the press pencil on a pile of papers. "I ought to send him to get Denny to motor you for a real feed in the cool somewhere, but I want you here." With perfect unconcern, he went on checking the list the property-man had left him. He had ceased trying to decide the meaning of the flutter which he was not sure Miss Adair really gave when she was pleased. He was too busy to think about anything but the rush and roar of the machinery of "The Purple Slipper," so he just kept Miss Adair so near him for all the waking hours of the day that he could have no occasion to have his thoughts distracted by worrying over just what might be befalling her. Day after day he extracted her from the Y. W. C. A. at ten o'clock A. M., fed her and Miss Lindsey coffee and rolls and berries just any place that they happened to see (often he even ate with the two girls in the big empty cafeteria at the institution), lunched with her in the same haphazard fashion, sought a cool and quiet spot to give her dinner, and a ride on a country road, turned her into the big safety at about eleven o'clock, and went to bed to sleep the sleep of the interestedly absorbed.

The few evenings that Miss Adair spent with Mr. Gerald Height Mr. Vandeford did not find repose so early or with such ease. Also, his awakening on those mornings after was not so joyous, and he arrived at the Y. W. C. A. fifteen and twenty minutes too early upon each occasion.

However, his time was well spent in chatting with the brisk young secretary, and his anxiety was entirely relieved each time by finding the look intact in the gray eyes raised to his in eager greeting after the prolonged absence of fourteen hours, when the usual separation was about ten.

"We went out to a place called the Beach Inn last night, and whom do you suppose we saw there?" she demanded on one of the mornings after, over her bowl of halved peaches.

"Mr. and Mrs. Devil?" he asked, with a sparkle breaking through the frown with which he had instantly greeted her mention of that gay beach resort.

"No; Miss Hawtry and Mr. Farraday. She wasn't nice to us at all, but Mr. Height says she always treats him badly when they are rehearsing together. I think Mr. Height is perfectly wonderful to her on the stage. He's so gentle and kind; but then he's that in real life, isn't he?"

"Is he?" growled Mr. Vandeford over his corn-flakes.

"Yes, and he's so just and fine in the way he speaks about everybody. He told me how poor Miss Hawtry used to be and how you pushed her along until she could buy that lovely house we passed, in which the Trevors are staying while she is in town. It is hard on you, too, not to be out there boarding with them and her instead of in this heat."

"Did Height say that I—I boarded—out there?" demanded Mr. Vandeford, pushing his coffee-cup away from him with a sudden snap.

"Yes, he said you stayed out there in the summer always, and—"

"We're late," interrupted Mr. Vandeford, snapping his watch with the same temper he had used on his coffee-cup. "Bring that saucer of peaches along and eat it in the car."

"I'll take an orange instead," assented Miss Adair, as with all good-nature and in all naturalness she deserted the last half of the rosy peach, took an orange from the bowl before her and stood up to go out to the car, which Valentine had parked in the shadow of the building opposite.

"You kid, you!" scoffed Mr. Vandeford, with an ache in his heart, but thanksgiving for that same youthful unsophistication. "Height or somebody will get it all across to her, and then what'll I do?" he growled to himself as he followed her into the car.

"And I saw that Mazie—Mazie woman there, too, with a terrible-looking man that has written ever so many plays that are successful." Mr. Vandeford was devoutly thankful that Mr. Grant Howard's name had not stuck in the consciousness of the author of "The Purple Slipper." "I—I was introduced to them too—because you know you said that I must—must accept broad standards, and I did—last night." Miss Adair looked away, but Mr. Vandeford could see that her little ears, set close against her small head, with their tips covered by a smooth band of hair, grew rosy.

"What?" he gasped, uncertain as to what she meant.

"Talked to that—that playwright and—and drank some champagne. I like cider better, but Mr. Height ordered it, and I thought—"

Here the car stopped, and Valentine was at the door. Valentine never failed to be at the door instantly when Miss Adair was in Mr. Vandeford's car, because his French soul rejoiced within him for thus serving a grand dame.

"Rooney is on the last lap of the last act, and then he'll begin to polish the whole for dress rehearsals," Mr. Vandeford said as he held the curtains of their box aside for her to enter.

"And Mr. Height told me, too, that the Trevors had—"

"Hush!" commanded Mr. Vandeford, becoming the stern producer, because he felt that he could stand no more of Mr. Height at the Beach Inn, though he began to listen intently to that same gentleman and Bebe Herne in the beginning of the great scene of the now authorless play. The anxieties passed from him, and in a moment he was in harness again with his author and running in perfect unison.

"Cut it off, Height, cut it off!" commanded Mr. Rooney, and he ran his hands into his shock of black hair, which stood up all over his head like a black, sooty mop. "That scene needs something. It isn't big and simple enough. What did she say to him in your first layout, miss?" he demanded of Miss Adair, for the first time acknowledging to the company the presence of the author of their play at the rehearsals. "Can you remember?"

"Yes," answered Miss Adair, with the home-made color blazing in her cheeks and fires in her gray eyes as she rose in the box, and gave the six lines as she had written them. Her lovely, slurring, Blue-grass voice made the whole company smile with pleasure.

"That's it! That's it! That's real people jawing and not a lot of smarty guff. Put that in, Fido, and write it in, Miss Herne," commanded Mr. Rooney, without any form of thanks to the accommodating and forgiving author.

And truth to say the author of "The Purple Slipper" did not notice his omission. She was in such joy at having something of the "big scene" express what she had intended that she was clasping one of Mr. Vandeford's hands in both hers and holding on tight to keep from shedding tears of joy.

"What did I tell you?" he asked, taking the two nervously clutched little hands into his warm, strong ones, unseen in the shadow of the box. "You keep getting things across to Bill by letting him ask you for what he wants. See?"

"Yes, and I'm always glad when I do as you tell me," she whispered, with her lips almost against his ear as they both turned back to the stage and watched their machine begin to run on greased wheels. Mr. Vandeford thought of the Beach Inn, Mazie, the bottle of champagne, and Mr. Gerald Height, and groaned inwardly.

The last week of the rehearsals of "The Purple Slipper" was a hectic rush, the like of which Miss Adair had never imagined. She had gone out again for the week-end to Mrs. Farraday's, up in Westchester, and this time Mr. Vandeford drove out on Sunday for tea and crape myrtle with Mr. Dennis Farraday, and, he was surprised to note again, Miss Mildred Lindsey. The day passed like an oasis in the midst of a desert storm, and Mr. Vandeford had the pleasure of making all arrangements for Mrs. Farraday, Mr. and Mrs. Van Tyne, and several other old Manhattaners, who had fallen under the spell of the young Kentuckian who had in an off moment perpetrated "The Purple Slipper," to go to Atlantic City the following week to be upon the spot for the opening of the play. Suites in the great new hotel were engaged by long-distance telephone, time-tables discussed, and trains settled upon by the time tea was over and the golden sun had let the twilight purple the rosy plumes of the huge myrtle hedges. In the dusk Valentine brought Mr. Vandeford's car from the garage and Mrs. Farraday's chauffeur drove out Mr. Dennis Farraday's beloved Surreness. Miss Lindsey said her farewell, and it again surprised Mr. Vandeford to see the gracious kiss Mrs. Farraday put upon the dusky red of the beautiful Western girl's cheek, while good Dennis stood smilingly by in the friendliest delight. Then a wistful sigh from the talented young author by his side claimed his instant attention.

"What is it?" he asked, with no attempt to control the tenderness in his voice, though the dusk hid that in his eyes.

"I want to go back to town with you," she answered him, with a little catch in her voice. "I feel so far away from you and—and IT, up here."