.

"You are a precious darling, and your play _must_ succeed!" said Miss
Lindsey impulsively at the end of the recital, and then she quickly
glanced at Mr. Godfrey Vandeford to see if he resented her taking this
affectionate liberty with his distinguished author. She found that
eminent producer not at home to her glance; he was lost in contemplation
of tears that hung on the long black lashes that veiled Miss Adair's
gray eyes and a little quiver that manifested itself on her red lips.
Then she shook off the tears by lifting those long lashes so that she
could look straight into his eyes with a smile of absolute confidence in
his intention and ability to remove from her life forever all of her
distress, which was alone poverty in the concrete, by being the
successful producer of her wonderful play. Men of Godfrey Vandeford's
type admit many strange fires and their votaries into the outer temple
of their hearts, but they keep the inner shrine tightly surrounded by
asbestos curtains. However, there is always one, and one only, closely
guarded entrance through which the ultimate woman must slip in an
unguarded moment. Mr. Godfrey Vandeford would never have thought of
being on any particular guard against the author of a play in purple
ribbons entitled "The Renunciation of Rosalind," but he knew almost
instantly that something dire had happened to him as he sat and writhed
at the thought of his plans for the extinction of that piece of dramatic
art, which he had not even read. The whole sophisticated world has
decided that there is no such thing as love at first sight, except the
biological scientists and they know and can prove that such a thing does
exist and that it is a worker of wonders. And dire pain is one of its
reactions.

But all agony comes to an end and so did Mr. Vandeford's. Miss Hawtry,
who had been so busy in her own mind with her own schemes that she had
no time to listen to Miss Adair's, picked up her gloves from beside her
final coffee-cup, and pulled the fine-meshed veil down over her
beautiful, though slightly snubbed, nose as a signal for a separation of
the group of feasters.

"May I motor you to your hotel, Miss Adair?" she asked very sweetly. Of
course Patricia did not know that she had got in her invitation at the
first signal of the feasters' disintegration, which she herself had
given, for the purpose of forestalling a similar invitation from Mr.
Farraday, whose Surreness she knew must be moor