er that the time had come for her
to cross another bridge. Thank God she would still be young, but the
kid of her would be left on the other side. If Martin had been there,
she would have told him some of the things that Alice had said about
being honest and paying up, and left it to him to say whether the
girlhood which she had wanted to spin out was over and must be put away
among her toys.

Alice and Gilbert Palgrave,--curious that it should have been those
two,--had shaken her individualism, as well as something else, vague
and untranslatable, that she couldn't quite grasp, that eluded her
hand. She sat down in the deep chair and with a little smile took up
one of Martin's pipes and looked at it. The good tobaccoey scent of it
took her back to the hill on the edge of the woods, and in her mind's
eye there was a picture of two clean eyes with laughter-lines coming
and going, a strong young face that had already caught the sun, square
shoulders and a broad chest, and a pair of reliable hands with
spatulate fingers clasped round a knee. She could hear birds calling.
Spring was in the air.

Where was Martin?

VII

It was the first dress rehearsal of "The Ukelele Girl," to be produced
"under the personal direction of Stanwood Mosely." The piece had been
in rehearsal for eleven weeks.

The curtain had been up on the second act for an hour. Scene designers,
scene painters and scene shifters were standing about with a stage
director, whose raucous voice cut the fuggy atmosphere incessantly in
what was intended to represent the exterior of a hotel at Monte Carlo.
It more nearly resembled the materialization of a dope fiend's dream of
an opium factory. What might have been a bank building in Utopia, an
old Spanish galleon in drydock, or the exterior of a German beer garden
according to the cover of Vogue occupied the center of the scene. The
bricks were violet and old gold, sprayed with tomato juice and marked
by the indeterminate silver tracks of snails. Pillars, modeled on the
sugar-stick posts that advertise barber's shops, ran up and lost
themselves among the flies. A number of wide stairs, all over wine
stains, wandered aimlessly about, coming to a conclusion between
gigantic urns filled with unnatural flowers of all the colors of a
diseased rainbow. Jotted about here and there on the stage were
octopus-limbed trees with magenta leaves growing in flower pots all
covered with bilious blobs. Stan Mosely didn