ly--he heard the
detested "line": "What are you two good people conspiring about?" Over
and over he saw the slow, comprehending movement with which she removed
her hat and veil to let Talbot Potter judge her. And as she stood, with
that critic's eye searching her, Canby remembered that through some
untraceable association of ideas he had inexplicably thought of a
drawing of "Florence Dombey" in an old set of Dickens engravings he had
seen at his grandfather's in his boyhood--and had not seen since. And
he remembered the lilac bushes in bloom on a May morning at his
grandfather's. Somehow she made him think of them, too.

And as he sat at his desk, striving to concentrate upon the manuscript,
the clearness with which Wanda Malone came before him increased; she
became more and more vivid to him, and she would not be dismissed; she
persisted and insisted, becoming first an annoyance, and then, as he
fought the witchery, a serious detriment to his writing. She became part
of every thought about his play, and of every other thought. He did not
want her; he felt no interest in her; he had vital work to do--and she
haunted him, seemed to be in the very room with him. He worked in spite
of her, but she pursued him none the less constantly; she had gone down
the stairs to dinner with him; she floated before him throughout the
torture of Miss Cornish's address; she was present even when he exploded
and fled; she was with him now, in this desolate walk toward Talbot
Potter's apartment--the pale, symmetrical little face and the relentless
sweet voice commandeering the attention he wanted desperately to keep
upon what he meant to say to Potter.

Once before in his life he had suffered such an experience: that of
having his thoughts possessed, against his will, by a person he did not
know and did not care to know. It had followed his happening to see an
intoxicated truck-driver lying beneath an overturned wagon. "Easy, boys!
Don' mangle me!" the man kept begging his rescuers. And Canby recalled
how "Easy, boys! Don' mangle me!" sounded plaintively in his ears for
days, bothering him in his work at the office. Remembering it now, he
felt a spiteful satisfaction in classing that obsession with this one.
It seemed at least a step toward teaching Miss Wanda Malone to know her
place.

But he got no respite from the siege, and was still incessantly
beleaguered when he encountered the marble severities of the Pantheon
Apartments' entranc