"Listen, Grace," he said. "I've got to talk to some one. You have come here, so you let yourself in for it.... Ten years ago I was reporting on a paper for a few dollars a week. It was a long way from Broadway. There was a dusty typewriter and dirty walls decorated with yellowed clippings—but ... There was wild young ambition and all of life ahead. That was living."
"Who was she?" insistently repeated the actress, when he paused.
"What can it matter how big a play one writes," demanded the author, "if he presents it to an empty house? The absence of one woman can make any house empty for any man. I'd give it all, to hear her say once more—" He broke off in abrupt silence.
"To hear her say what, Bobby?" prompted Grace Bristol, softly.
"Well," he answered with a miserable laugh, "something she used to say."
"I suppose, Bobby—" the girl spoke very slowly, and a little wistfully, too—"I suppose it wouldn't do any good to—to hear any one else say it?"
He shook his head.
"Do you remember, Grace," he went on, "the other evening, when we were sitting in the café at the Lorillard and the orchestra in another room was playing 'Whispering Angels'? The hundred noises of the place almost drowned it out, yet we were always straining our ears to catch the music—and when there came a momentary lull, it would swell up over everything else. That's how it is with this—and sometimes it swells up and slugs one—simply slugs one, that's all." He broke off and laughed again. "I guess I'm talking no end of rot. You probably don't understand."
She raised her face and spoke with dignity.
"Why don't I understand, Bobby? Because I'm a show-girl?"