e who had seen the girl act in amateur things had
exaggerated her ability. He trusted no judgment but his own, which was
perhaps one of the reasons why he was one of the greatest living stage
managers. It was more than likely she had nothing but a pretty, shallow
little talent for play acting and no notion under the sun of giving up
society or matrimony or what-not for the devilish hard work of a stage
career. Very likely there was some young galoot waiting even now, to
whisk Laura LaRue's daughter off the stage before she ever got on.

Moreover there was always her family to cope with, dyed in the wool New
Englanders at that, no doubt with the heavy Puritan mortmain upon them,
narrow as a shoe string, circumscribed as a duck pond, walled in by
ghastly respectability. Ten to one, if the girl had talent and ambition,
they would smother these things in her, balk her at every turn. They had
regarded Ned Holiday's marriage to Laura a misalliance, he recalled.
There had been quite a to-do about it at the time. Good God! It had been
a misalliance all right, but not as they reckoned it. It had not been
considered suitable for a Holiday to marry an actress. Probably it would
be considered more unsuitable for a Holiday to _be_ an actress. Suitable!
Bah! The question was not whether the career was fit for the girl, but
whether the girl could measure up to the career. And irascibly,
unreasonably indignant as if he had already been contending in argument
with legions of mythical, over-respectable Holidays, Max Hempel whipped
his paper open to another page, a page that told of a drive somewhere on
the western front that had failed miserably, for this was the year
nineteen hundred and sixteen and there was a war going on, "on the other
side." Oh, typically American phrase!

Meanwhile the young man, too, had stopped staring at Antoinette Holiday's
pictured face and was staring out of the window instead at the fast
flying landscape. He had really no need anyway to look at a picture of
Tony. His head and heart were full of them. He had been storing them up
for over eight years and it was a considerable collection by now and one
in which he took great joy in lonely hours in his dingy little lodging
room, or in odd moments as he went his way at his task as a reporter for
a great New York daily. The perspicuous reader will not need to be told
that the young man was in love with Tony Holiday--desperately in love.

Desperately was the word.