The Life and Death of Mary Trevena

I

EVERYONE knew that Mr. Trossett was writing a play. The rumor was discreetly spread among the hostesses whose drawing-rooms Mr. Trossett was pleased to frequent, although for a long time no one asked him about it. His strange way of shutting himself in a tight-lipped silence when pressed for personal revelations was too well known. Not that anybody was afraid of Mr. Trossett: they were all rather afraid of hurting him. And in his talkative moods he was so mordantly clever, so likely to say small, ridiculous, ‘devastating’ things which could never be forgotten, that no one wanted to risk driving him into defensive silence. He was like a sensitive plant — with nettles. Surrounded by smiles and sympathy, he cast his tiny barbs expertly in all directions and appeared to enjoy giving people mildly scandalous pleasure. But if even the friendliest glance was turned directly on him he shrank and the inquirer felt like a brute who had trod on the trustful tendrils of a flower.

Mrs. Hartsfield, whose tact and courage were extraordinary, finally mentioned it to him. They were alone in her library and tea was steaming homely comfort into the atmosphere between them. Mrs. Hartsfield leaned back in the shadowy depths of a highbacked chair, much too slight and quiet ever to seem insistent, and Mr. Trossett was watching her, she knew, with appreciation. It was an opportune moment.

In answer to her question he only gasped slightly and then said, ‘ I hope some day to be able to talk to you about it. ‘

That admission contented Mrs. Hartsfield for the moment, but when it was shared with others they were not so willing to respect his reticence. They wanted to know more. Their chosen emissary was Barry Whelan, because Whelan was the only man ever known to visit Trossett in his home.

Whelan was of such stern stuff that he felt no shame whatever in going directly to the small apartment where Trossett hid himself and spending two hours in aimless conversation hoping to find a cue for mentioning the play. Whelan’s admiration for his friend was tremendously hearty; he was sure that if Trossett ever did write a play it would be a thing of the airiest perfection. While he was floundering about in his good-humored way, trying to stumble on the key to confidences, he noticed an unfamiliar picture on the mantelshelf of the little sitting-room. The room was so simple and austere, in spite of a shy untidiness, that any change struck even a careless eye. There had never been anything on the mantelshelf before but two blue-willow plates, a needlework sampler in a frame, and a German beer-stein on whose pewter top a fat monk caressed his jaw with fixed, incongruous mirth. Now there was a sketch, a pencil drawing of a lovely girl, leaning against the beer-stein. It was no more than half finished and looked as if the artist might have put it down when interrupted, but the eyes and the sweet line of the lips were already evoked in delicate touches.

’I did n’t know that you drew,’ said Whelan, supposing naturally that the sketch was by somebody else. He was surprised when Trossett acknowledged authorship.

His host blushed and smoothed the top of his high forehead with a small white hand. ‘I don’t, really,’ he answered. ‘I just happened to be inspired to draw a picture of Mary.’

Whelan raised compelling eyebrows at him and asked, ‘Who is Mary?’

Trossett blushed again. ‘Mary Trevena,’ he replied. ‘She’s the heroine of a — of a sort of play I’ve been trying to write.’

His visitor did not give the drawing another glance. He turned and said with great satisfaction, ‘I’ve always thought you ought to write a play, Trossett. It’s just your sort of thing. I ‘ll bet it will be the cleverest little comedy that Broadway has had a chance at in years. Your gift for dialogue has always been the admiration of your friends.’

‘But it is n’t to be that sort of thing at all.’ The playwright looked alarmed. ‘It is n’t going to be clever, you know. It is quite serious and rather foolishly romantic.’

He rose and turned the sketch of Mary Trevena to the wall.

‘Even so,’ Whelan persisted, ‘it will surprise Broadway—’

‘I don’t believe that Broadway will ever be bothered with it,’ said Trossett, firmly. ‘I’m not writing it for production. ‘

‘But, my dear fellow, why should you —and your intimate friends — be so selfish? It’s our duty to share the thing with the world at large.’

‘I don’t believe,’ said Trossett, still more firmly, ‘that even my best friends will ever see it. I’m writing it for myself and for her.’ He waved his hand vaguely toward the back of the sketch on the shelf.

Whelan laughed at this poetic notion. ‘The real author comes out in you at once. You are thinking already of your heroine as a living person. That’s splendid!’ He rubbed his hands and beamed. ‘But I don’t believe you will be so obstinately stingy when the time comes. Why — how can your heroine, your “Mary Trevena,” ever have any life at all unless you make her known to people? She has some rights, you know. She has a right to be admired and applauded. ‘ But he did not continue the argument then. He took it for granted that Trossett would be willing to share his charming heroine with the world as soon as she could be perfected,

He rushed away to tell Mrs. Hartsfield immediately his confirmation of the great news and to comment with her on Trossett’s characteristic whim.

The playwright was left alone. He was used to being alone. That little sitting-room had been his donjon of retirement for ten or twelve years, ever since he had come to New York and found a habitable corner in West Twelfth Street. Except for Whelan, no friend ever saw its shabby interior. And Whelan was not the man to guess that ‘Mary Trevena’ had been a visitor to its loneliness for a long time.

She came first to admire the bluewillow plates. They were a present from Trossett’s great-aunt, Mrs. Moseby-Smith, who distributed, just before her death, the treasures of her collection. He received, without previous announcement, a box filled with excelsior, and in its crisp heart were the two willow plates. Their rich, blue, ancient shine was a thrilling pleasure as he took them carefully from their wrappings and set them upright on the white-marble shelf above his fireplace. He sat in his deepest chair and put the tips of his fingers together and admired them through half-closed eyes. They were quite perfect.

He smiled when he saw how crassly masculine and ugly they made the old beer-stein which had preëmpted a place on the shelf long before. And in thinking of that incongruity he felt a slight wave of shame. Mr. Trossett hated being effeminate; he bit his tongue on the expression of effeminate opinions. He had cultivated a half-hearted way of slapping his knee to punctuate a laugh, a gesture which was mildly absurd and only served to call attention to his natural quietness. Now he was shamed in his delight over the soft brilliance of the willow plates because it occurred to him that no man had a right to feel so much emotion over two pieces of old china. But he had a courageous æsthetic honesty. Whether it was effeminate to admire them or not, they deserved admiration, and he fell to imagining how much pleasure they could give to a woman inhabitant of that room, if there had been one.

It was in the evening when that fancy struck him. He had turned the straight shaft of light, from a table lamp along the glowing blue of the plates, leaving the rest of the room in dusk. Across the fireplace from him was another chair, deep and hospitable like his own. Its high back had two curved side-pieces in whose corners a head might rest and be almost hidden. As the lady first began to take shape in the dark recesses of that chair, she was much like Mrs. Hartsfield. Certainly Mrs. Hartsfield was the most charming woman he knew, the most sympathetic, the most cultivated, possibly the most intelligent. And she had in physical presence a gently poised serenity, soothing and encouraging at the same time. But he checked the involuntary effort of his imagination to put Mrs. Hartsfield in that chair so that she could admire the blue plates. She belonged, with the brutality of fact, to that crass fool, her husband. In his own sitting-room at least, Trossett insisted upon being himself and having a lady of his own.

So he fixed his gaze on the shadowed cushions of the empty chair and labored to convince himself that his own special lady was sitting there, breathing soft admiration of the blue china, The materialization was not complete in his first attempt. He could supply the ghost of his fancy with effective, ladylike phrases of delight. He spoke one of these comments aloud involuntarily and startled himself with the sound of his own voice in the dusky, empty room where no ghost had ever been before. But he found that a too eager scrutiny of the shadows drove away the image which seemed to be gathering out of impalpable atmosphere. He kept courteously distant in his contemplation, and the suggestion of a gracious presence remained with him all that evening.

Inevitably he renewed the experiment. When he entered his sittingroom the next evening, he glanced at the great chair as if to inquire if the lady might be there ahead of him. He looked reproachfully at the blue china because it had not done its duty in evocation. Settled in his own place, he stirred the fire and then looked quickly over his shoulder to surprise her. He laughed aloud at his own silliness, but there was a catch in his breath when he saw, he was sure he saw, the fold of a pale-green silk garment on the chair. He knew, although the thought had never shaped itself in his mind, that she would be fond of wearing pale-green silk. It would go with her wraithlike slenderness and the coil of redbrowm hair she would bind like a coronet over her brows. He shrank into his own place and looked across with the most circumspect gentleness. He was rewarded with the white glimmer of her face, framed in her hair and turned toward the fire.

Trossett was a very sane man in spite of his playful, timid spite and his capacity for emotion over such things as blue-china plates. He knew how completely imaginary was the personality he was creating; he never once tried to deceive himself about reality. She was a fancy. But as fancy she took on, night by night, new color and warmth and surprising variety. He very seldom tried to see her. That was too evidently a dangerous exercise, but he could none the less feel her presence. She conquered for him the shame of effeminacy. He began to rearrange his decorations, few and shabby, his prints, his books, in accord with the feminine taste he had been afraid to avow in action even in retirement. He considered casting out the ugly German beer-stein, with its fat-jowled pewter monk, but gave it thumbs up at last because this was to be, after all, an apartment for two people, not just for the woman alone. It was the apartment of a man and a woman together, a home. His exquisite sensibility was amused with the thought of making a room such as could be described as ‘a man’s home refined by the touch of a woman.’ Since nobody but his charwoman and Barry Whelan ever entered there, and both those honest, slightly obtuse friends were incapable of noting subtle changes, he kept the presence of the lady a secret for many months.

However, a lady who never spoke could not be permanently satisfactory. He wrote out a little dialogue one evening, between himself and her, in which all the wittiest things were resolutely ascribed to the lady. To himself, in his rôle of masculine personality, was given all the heaviness on which the lady exercised her wit. He invented a name for her, first ‘Mary’ and then, since ‘Mrs. Trossett’ struck him as not only absurd but altogether unromantic, he added an independent surname. ‘Mary Trevena.’ The surname was one he had read in a novel. The initials ‘ M. T.’ were put in his spidery script at the beginning of her speeches. A sheet of note paper with four exchanges of this imaginary talk — ‘ M. T. ‘ says, and ‘M.’ (meaning, the Man) replies— fell from his pocket one day in Mrs. Hartsfield’s drawing-room. It was that unlucky but typical accident which loosed the gossips in their hunt after his play.

Whelan’s discovery of the sketch of Mary drove him into further avowals. The half-mythical play served to disguise the fact which he dared not confess.

But as the dialogue between the Man and Mary Trevena grew, on page after page of fine tracings, the Man, rather heavy perhaps in all but his appreciation of Mary, tried constantly to push things to some sort of conclusion. He was stupidly human; he insisted on making personal application of charmingly impersonal remarks; he indulged in broad compliments; he protested devotion and hinted in a gentlemanly way at desire. He was unmanageable. Mr. Trossett began to see at last that he would not be able to keep the affair suspended between them forever. There would have to be a real play with intrigue and entanglement and finally some sort of dénouement.

In a careless moment he was reading the column of a pert dramatic reporter and he paused on the hideous phrase ‘a kiss curtain.’ He shuddered and denied himself the thought of Mary Trevena for a week. But he was pursued in imagination by that phrase, ‘a kiss curtain, ‘ and by the necessity for surrendering her at last to the atrocious, engulfing appetite of the Man.

II

Mrs. Hartsfield and the others took counsel with Barry Whelan as to how they could persuade Mr. Trossett to disgorge his masterpiece.

‘He is just shy, poor thing,’ said Mrs. Hartsfield. ‘We must encourage him to realize that he is really very clever and could not possibly fail.’

Whelan snorted pleasantly at the mere suggestion of failure. He knew personally a great many actors; in fact Miss Constance Tremaine herself was his distant cousin. He even knew a few managers and one play agent. He had heard often enough of what those people were all looking for, and he refused to believe that many of the flourishing playwrights could be compared with Trossett for downright cleverness. He would be only too happy to get the play produced. If it had a good woman’s part he would try to persuade Connie Tremaine to consider it for herself. They would provide it with such presentation that it could not possibly fail. He was eager to get ‘old Trossett’ out into greatness with a friendly push.

So the circle around Mrs. Hartsfield conspired with the Man in poor Trossett’s imagination to bring the affair of Mary Trevena to a conclusion. Once he had admitted that the play was in progress he was warmly asked for news whenever he appeared. His little formula, ‘Sometime I hope to be able to talk about it,’ wore out and he had to substitute, ‘Oh, it’s getting on, thank you.’ And it did get on. Their importunings were brazen now and he tried to satisfy their affectionate greed for his glory. But he never really faced the fact that some day Mrs. Hartsfield would say, ‘But, my dear Mr. Trossett, is n’t it finished yet?' and he would have to go home and write the dreadful final scene — when the Man got Mary Trevena.

When he felt that necessity threatening, he tried to be consoled with the thought that the Man was only part of himself. The conclusion could not rob him of Mary’s presence. She would remain in his household although captured and tamed at last.

When the crisis came and he sat down at his writing-table, with the presence of Mary Trevena behind him in her seat by the fire, Mr. Trossett could scarcely hold his fingers steady to write the last fatal sentences. They went like this: —

THE MAN (often he wrote ‘The Brute’ instead of ‘The Man’). Don’t you realize, my dear Mary, that life is not made up entirely of gossamer dreams and the shine of dew in the morning?

M. T. If only it could be!

THE MAN. No. Things must happen. Playing is enough for children, Mary, but you and I are grown up. And other children are waiting to take our places.

(He was a Brute, sometimes.)

M. T. I love morning better than noon.

THE MAN. But noon comes on and then we cannot always be hesitating. I love you, Mary.

Mr. Trossett struggled hard to avoid that banal phrase, but every substitute he tried sounded even more banal and less dignified. He had finally to let it stand, common as earth —and life. He glanced back over his shoulder once or twice to see if he could conjure up any visible sign of her presence. He could not be sure. Her portrait, finished now and framed above his table, had averted eyes. He wiped his forehead, laughing gently at his own agony. He underlined the words, ‘I love you, Mary.’

And Mary answered, in spidery tracings on the white sheet, ‘Of course. How else could we be happy, belonging to each other as we do ? ‘

Then Mr. Trossett gave way completely and dropped his pen. He turned toward the back of her chair, but dared not go round to his own seat for fear he would not see her. ‘Mary,’ he whispered, and that was the first time he had ever spoken directly to her, ‘I promise that no one else shall ever know. That is life, — what I have written down, — but you and I are not bound to live. We’ll just go on pretending that there is no end to anything. Only stay as you are, as you have been for so long. Stay here with me and no one shall ever know what I have written about you.’

He held out his hands in trembling appeal to the back of the chair. She must stay there forever — to justify a love of blue china. But his back was turned to the seductive blue shine on the mantelshelf. He was staring at the chair arm, praying for the sight of green silk. ‘ Mary, ‘ he said, ‘ this Man — this Brute — is myself. I want you — I want you — ‘ He seized the chair with hot hands and whirled it about. A flaming passion choked him. Appalled by his own eagerness he buried his face in the shadowy softness where a real woman should have been.

III

When Barry Whelan came next time and noticed a heap of manuscript he was checked in the act of glancing at it.

‘The thing is finished,’ Trossett confessed, in a chilly voice, ‘but no one is ever going to see it.’ Before Whelan’s fascinated eyes he picked it up and threw it into a cabinet. ‘ I never expect to look at it again myself. ‘ He slammed the door of the cabinet, and when his guest tried to argue with him he sat in tight-lipped obstinacy against which nothing could prevail.

It was not on this occasion that Barry Whelan committed the crime for which he has since become rather famous. It was later. It came at the end of a long and exasperating argument between him and Trossett in which Whelan cited every fact he could think of from the lives of great authors to convince his host that Mary Trevena must be given to the world. There lay the pile of script in the cabinet where it had been thrown. There was the great public crystallized, apotheosized, so to speak, in Broadway, and waiting for it. There was Whelan eager to be the messenger. And only an absurd delicacy stood in the way. Poor Trossett’s vigilance was not equal to his determination.

IV

The unsuspicious playwright was discovered, about three weeks later, sitting before his fire across from the empty chair. Whelan was boisterously excited when he came in. He started to sit down in the empty chair, but his host protested with positive dismay. ‘No, don’t!’ Whelan paused in mid-air. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Trossett, with an embarrassed smile. ‘ But would you mind sitting in — somewhere else?

‘That one is n’t very comfortable,’ he lied, while Whelan allowed himself to be ushered into a smaller and much less attractive seat.

But Whelan essayed lightness and good-humored remorse. ‘When I tell you my little tale,’ he began, ‘you probably won’t want me to sit anywhere in your house.’

The other looked at him with very small interest in his jocosity.

' How does it feel to be a great dramatist?’ demanded Whelan, with infinite tact.

‘M-m-m-m,’ answered the great dramatist, waiting for the point.

‘How are you going to like it when your play is the rage of New York, eh?’ Whelan managed a genial and real-sounding laugh.

‘That can never happen. I shall never write a play for New York.’

‘ But you have! ‘

Something in the nervous loudness of Whelan’s tone made Trossett sit up straight and stare. He rubbed a shaking small hand over his forehead. His eye, aghast, wandered from Whelan’s face toward the door of the cabinet. He started to rise.

‘Don’t bother to look, old man,’said Whelan. ‘It’s gone.’ Then he went on hurriedly. ‘We are all delighted with your good luck. Mrs. Hartsfield and everybody — we are all quite happy.’

‘My good luck?’ Trossett repeated, in a daze.

‘Yes. You know how much I admire you, Trossett, and how much faith I had in anything you would write, even though I hadn’t read it. Well—’ He found it difficult to go on, the man’s eyes were so full of pain and astonishment. ‘I thought your play ought to have a hearing, so — ‘

Trossett got to his feet, walked to the cabinet, and threw it open. The manuscript was not there. He dropped to the seat by the writing-desk and stared with pitiful bewilderment at the triumphant robber.

Whelan tried to bluster and laugh, but nothing changed the silence. Trossett said at last, ‘Would you mind leaving me alone? I have some explanations to make.’ On that enigmatic dismissal Whelan had to take his leave.

V

The critic who finally found the right words to describe Miss Constance Tremaine called her a ‘lovely hoyden.’ She had sprung up and bloomed suddenly in the garden of New York’s unknown actresses like a solitary nasturtium, and every eye was from that day forth fixed on her in wide wonder.

Her manager, who had come to know her, did not suggest directly that she undertake to create, for the great world, the character of Mary Trevena. He counseled her cousin, Mr. Whelan, not to approach her on the subject. Instead he casually suggested that he had run across an interesting new play which she might be amused to read.

She burst into his office next morning, cast the blue-bound transcript of Mary Trevena’s soul down upon his desk, and slapped it with a slender, imperious hand. ‘Let me do that thing!' she cried, in a voice which admitted no question of obedience. The bright eyes, which could pierce the dark pit of a theatre to the last row of upturned faces, were warm with vital enthusiasm. Before her manager’s heavy gaze, her figure was tense in the telling clarity of a perfect pose. Her personality, untrammeled by the minor impediments of playing a rôle, was flaming. With her manager, Miss Tremaine was that hidden being whom admirers and journalists pursued in vain — her ‘real self.'

Her manager smiled covertly and said he would take the new play into consideration. He kept her waiting three days before he told her he would, as a matter of acceding to her wishes, produce ‘Mary Trevena’ as soon as she was free from her present part, which began, from that day, to fall off in quality. Everything was all settled and rehearsals began in three months.

Mrs. Hartsfield feared some active interference by Mr. Trossett to save his play from the public. But that was beyond his strength. He was a silent martyr in their hands when once the trick was played. He even put his name on a contract, without reading it, although he did succeed in refusing to see the manager or Miss Tremaine or to attend rehearsals. Whelan was wearied in trying to get anything but a reproachful and miserable silence out of him as he was told how splendidly things were going and how Connie Tremaine had told at least four people that it was the best part she had ever had. She was crazy about it. She loved it. She was dying to meet the author. But the author would not be met.

He withdrew from his regular round of drawing-rooms, and Mrs. Hartsfield never saw him from one at-home day to the next. He spent evening hours in the big chair by his fireplace looking at the averted eyes of Mary Trevena’s portrait. He was sure he had been forgiven by the lady whose fragile presence was being sinned against. So understanding a person as she could not feel resentment against his innocent carelessness. But he suffered for her.

He had only the meagrest consolation in the fact that Mary Trevena was in those lines, all of her. He knew Miss Tremaine was a competent and brilliant actress and he struggled with the hope that the lines might be honestly and bravely spoken. It would be the wanton exposure of a lovely thing before a rabble without understanding, but at least it would be the real Mary; and perhaps one or two souls might comprehend. He leaned timorously on that.

VI

Any play which starred Connie Tremaine was sure of a brilliant first night. All the critics whose word meant anything to the amateurs of dramatic gossip would be there with sharpened wits. Each one hoped he might discover some new adjective by which he could embalm himself with her forever in the amber of a phrase. They all admitted the justice of the ‘lovely hoyden, but they hoped perhaps to equal that classic epithet. The Empire was filled with people through whom ran sympathetic waves of delightful suspense.

The first act was puzzling. It had wit, certainly, and not a line but went ringing from Connie’s pretty lips in crystal accuracy, straight at the susceptible listener. She knew how to make her points. But the act offered little hope of ever getting anywhere. ‘What a queer thing,’ said the critics during the intermission. ‘It’s clever enough, but it does n’t sound like a play.’ One man, out of depths of erudition, brought up a forgotten analogy. ‘Sounds like a Dolly Dialogue,’ he said, and two men remembered enough to smile.

The second act was no better. It was quite evident that the verdict of the jury which ranged itself in silence and darkness on the receptive side of the footlights was going to be mild. The play about Mary Trevena was doomed to be praised for its delectable dialogue and put down with that dreadfulest of condemnations, ‘ Clever, but not a play.’

Miss Tremaine and her manager had a little talk in her dressing-room before the third and final act. ‘The thing is dead,’ he pronounced succinctly with the complete despair of a first night in his voice. ‘It’s dead!’

But Connie had more at stake than the rôle of Mary Trevena. She had never suffered a failure or a moderate success. She meant to harvest superlatives out of the evening if it. lay within her brilliant little self to do it. She clenched her fists and dabbed at her make-up and swore a ladylike but heartfelt oath.

‘Can’t you rough it a little?’ asked her manager.

‘I’ll save it,’ promised Miss Tremaine, through her teeth. ‘You watch me! I’ll stand those people on their heads yet. I tell you this is a great play.’

‘Go ahead and prove it,’ answered her manager, and wrathfully chewed his cigar.

Miss Tremaine felt a consuming rage against the author who had so bungled his revelation of the character of Mary Trevena. Authors — bah! They never knew the stage possibilities of their own people. She would plunge into the nebulous texture of this dialogue and find reality and bring it forth for the blessed audience to see. She knew what Mary Trevena ought to be; she ought to be exactly like Constance Tremaine. Mary Trevena was a name to which Connie’s sturdy beauty could give a local habitation.

She leaped back upon the stage, alert and ruthless, and proceeded to ‘rough it a little.’ Subtleties which had puzzled the keenest of the audience were glossed with blinding smiles and magnetic gestures. Dreamy reluctance was blown out of the lines as cool mist flees a wind.

Below the perfected surface of her self, not very far below perhaps, but hidden deeper than other elements of her soul, Miss Tremaine had a knowledge of her unnumbered sisters. What women could feel she knew; and she could give that knowledge an irresistible impersonation. A flaming passion was in her throat, too, but she could not be choked. She set it free. She dragged the lovely hesitations of Mary’s phrases away from what they had concealed. She throbbed with emotions immutable and everlasting — the springs of life.

The actor who played The Man had been chosen for responsiveness to her, and now he caught fire. The dialogue became hot and human. People in the back rows sat up as if to say ‘Aha!’ The pursuit of sex emerged, a stark duel, from behind Mr. Trossett’s symbolic musings.

Miss Tremaine took a line meant to cast a shy, reverent light on the fancy of a girl and shot it into the air — a challenge to a world of men.

A small, trembling man, taking his hand from his high white forehead, arose in the middle of the pit. Many people did not see him; they were intent upon the quickening pulse of the play. But he cried out in a high-pitched voice, ‘Stop!’

Not a tremor disturbed the taut rhythms of Miss Tremaine on the stage. She may not have heard the cry of distress; at any rate she went on, gloriously effective.

‘Stop!’ cried the little man in the pit.

‘ You blasphemer!'

When people around him began to rise and make noises, and two murderously angry ushers rushed toward him, he turned from his seat and walked weakly up the aisle.

The ‘friends of the author,’ Mrs. Hartsfield and Barry Whelan and all the others, who had occupied exposed box-seats and wondered where Trossett had hid himself, watched him go with appalled helplessness. They did not try to follow. Around their corner congealed a heavy, fearful silence, while the rest of the audience, scarcely noticing the antics of the queer stranger, turned back in loyal appreciation to the spectacle of Constance Tremaine impersonating womanhood.

The rest of the play was frequently interrupted with shattering outbursts of applause. It seemed at last to mean something. The critics settled back in their seats with simulated boredom, content now, and sure they could use all their prepared adjectives.

The final scene was riotous. With flowers and shouts and waving hands and cries for a speech, a great clamor and joy swept up toward the victorious Tremaine. She panted and smiled and stood out to be adored. Barry Whelan, who had planned to rise at this moment and shout ‘Author! Author!’ sat in blank silence. Mrs. Hartsfield, more courageous, clapped and smiled an utterly empty smile. Beyond their most extravagant expectations the play was a success.

VII

Mr. Trossett stood before his own door on the landing of the old house in Twelfth Street and hesitated. There was a vague sound of blasphemous echoes in his mind, and in his heart was nauseous despair. He was afraid to enter his apartment—‘a man’s home refined by the touch of a woman.’ It took his last strength to step through the door and switch on the light. He dropped into his big chair by the fireplace.

After a long while he took his hand away from his eyes. The room was cold. The light from the heavily curtained lamp on the table cast a bitterly clear illumination over the empty chair opposite him. There was no suggestion there of a presence, no gleam of palegreen silk, no glimmer of a face, no aura of an unseen, lovely woman. Mary Trevena was a broken dream.

Mr. Trossett was a brave man. He took the effeminate blue-china plates down from the mantelshelf and smashed them in the fireplace.