"He has more than one?" This seemed to puzzle Kennedy.
"He's been interested in any number on the side," Millard explained.
"Now he's formed another, but it's a secret so far. You've heard of
Fortune Features, perhaps?"
Kennedy looked at me, but I shook my head.
"What is 'Fortune Features'?" Kennedy asked the question of Millard.
"Just another company in which Manton has an interest," he replied, casually. "That was why I said I advised that Enid make her contract personally with Manton. If Manton Pictures goes up, then he will have to swing her into Fortune Features—the other Manton enterprise, don't you see?" He paused, then added: "By the way, don't say anything outside about that. It isn't generally known—and as soon as anyone does hear it, everybody in the film game will hear it. You don't know how gossip travels in this business."
Kennedy asked a few personal questions about Stella, but Millard's answers indicated that he had not contemplated or even hoped for a reconciliation, that his interest in his former wife had become thoroughly platonic. Just now, however, he seemed unable to keep Manton out of his mind.
"Oh, Manton's clever!" he said, confidentially to Kennedy, as he watched the promoter deftly maneuvering Leigh and Enid into a position side by side.
And indeed, as Millard talked, I began to get some inkling of how really clever was the game which Manton played.
"Why," continued Millard, warming up to his story—for, to him, above all, a good story was something that had to be told, whatever might result from it—"I have known him to pay a visit some afternoon to Wall Street—go down there to beard the old lions in their den. He always used to show up about the closing time of the market.
"I've known him to get into the office of some one like Leigh or Phelps. Then he'll begin to talk about his brilliant prospects in the company he happens to be promoting at the time. If you listen to Manton you're lost. I know it—I've listened," he added, whimsically.