"I wasn't complaining," replied she sweetly. "You know I understand about business."
"Yes, I know," said he, with his air of generosity that always made her feel grateful. "I always feel perfectly free about you."
"I should say!" laughed she. "You know I don't care what happens so long as you succeed." Since their talk in Broadway that first evening in New York she had instinctively never said "we."
When they were at the table at Rector's and he had taken a few more drinks, he became voluble and plausible on the subject of the trifling importance of his setback as a playwright. It was the worst possible time of year; the managers were stocked up; his play would have to be rewritten to suit some particular star; a place on a newspaper, especially such an influential paper as the Herald, would be of use to him in interesting managers. She listened and looked convinced, and strove to convince herself that she believed. But there was no gray in her eyes, only the deepest hue of violets.
Next day they took a suite of two rooms and a bath in a pretentious old house in West Forty-fourth Street near Long Acre Square. She insisted that she preferred another much sunnier and quieter suite with no bath but only a stationary washstand; it was to be had for ten dollars a week. But he laughed at her as too economical in her ideas, and decided for the eighteen-dollar rooms. Also he went with her to buy clothes, made her spend nearly a hundred dollars where she would have spent less than twenty-five. "I prefer to make most of my things," declared she. "And I've all the time in the world." He would not have it. In her leisure time she must read and amuse herself and keep herself up to the mark, especially physically. "I'm proud of your looks," said he. "They belong to me, don't they? Well, take care of my property, Miss."
She looked at him vaguely—a look of distance, of parting, of pain. Then she flung herself into his arms with a hysterical cry—and shut her eyes tight against the beckoning figure calling her away. "No! No!" she murmured. "I belong here—here!"
"What are you saying?" he asked.
"Nothing—nothing," she replied.
CHAPTER XXV
AT the hotel they had been Mr. and Mrs. Spenser. When they moved, he tried to devise some way round this; but it was necessary that they have his address at the office, and Mrs. Pershall with the glistening old-fashioned false teeth who kept the furnished-room house was not one in whose withered bosom it would be wise to raise a suspicion as to respectability. Only in a strenuously respectable house would he live; in the other sort, what might not untrustworthy Susan be up to? So Mr. and Mrs. Spenser they remained, and the truth was suspected by only a few of their acquaintances, was known by two or three of his intimates whom he told in those bursts of confidence to which voluble, careless men are given—and for which they in resolute self-excuse unjustly blame strong drink.