Miss Cornish because he was a genius and couldn't help
doing queer things. That solace was slight, indeed; Canby was only
twenty-seven, but he was frightened.

The night before he had been as eagerly happy as a boy at Christmas Eve.
He had finished his last day at the office, and after initiating the
youth who was to take his desk, had parted with his employer genially,
but to the undeniable satisfaction of both. The new career, opening
so gloriously, a month earlier, with Talbot Potter's acceptance of the
play, was thus definitely adopted, and no old one left to fall back
upon. And Madison Avenue, after dark, shows little to reassure a new
playwright who carries in his pocket a note ending with the words,
"before deciding to put on another play I have been considering." It was
Bleak Street, that night, for young Stewart Canby, and a bleak, bleak
walk he took therein.

Desperate alterations were already scratched into the manuscript; plans
for more and more ran overlapping one another in his mind, accompanied
by phrases--echoes and fragments of Talbot Potter: "Punch! What this
play needs is Punch!" "Big love scenes!" "Big scene with a man!" "Great
sacrifice for a woman!" "Big-hearted, lovable fellow!" "You dog! So on,
so on!" "Zowie!" He must get all this into the play and yet preserve
his "third act situation," leniently admitted to be "quite a fair" one.
Slacking his gait somewhat, the tormented young man lifted his hat in
order to run his hand viciously through his hair, which he seemed to
blame for everything. Then he muttered, under his breath, indignantly:
"Darn you, let me alone!"

Curious bedevilment! It was not Talbot Potter whom he thus adjured: it
was Wanda Malone. And yet, during the rehearsal, he had not once thought
consciously of the understudy; and he had come away from the theatre
occupied--exclusively, he would have sworn--with the predicament in
which he found himself and his play. Surely that was enough to fill and
overflow any new playwright's mind, but, about half an hour after he had
reached his room and set to work upon the manuscript of the second
act, he discovered that he had retained, unawares, a singularly clear
impression of Miss Malone.

Then, presently, he realized that distinct pictures of her kept
coming between him and his work, and that her voice rang softly
and persistently in his ear. Over and over in that voice's slender
music--plaintive, laughing, reaching everywhere so clear