“All literary people are bores but you, my dear,” Miss Dwight declared, hurrying Madeline away. “I discovered that years ago, but I’m always forgetting it again. If anybody else sends me a poem, please remind me to shun her. Time in Harding is too precious to be wasted.”
Miss Dwight could stay away from New York only two days—“two sweet, stolen days,” she called them. Then she hurried back to the rehearsals, leaving Madeline in Betty’s charge.
“She’s done all that she can for her play now,” she explained, “and she’d far better stay here. She might make us nervous, and she’d certainly make herself miserable. Rehearsals are such contrary things. They’ve gone so abominably up to now that I’m absolutely sure the play will be a hit.”
The nature of the hit was still a mystery. Madeline, Miss Dwight, and her manager were all stubbornly dumb. The title wasn’t even put on the bill-boards until a week before the opening night, and then it might mean anything—“Her Choice.”
Nearly all the B. C. A.’s were going down to see the first performance, but the one who was most excited at the prospect, next to Madeline, was undoubtedly Eleanor Watson. Her gowns had figured in Madeline’s “walking part,” but that wasn’t the chief reason for her interest in the play. The great thing was that Richard Blake was giving a box party and a supper, and he had asked her and Jim to come. Dick had almost never taken her anywhere, and this winter he had been too busy even to come often to call. Yet Madeline seemed to see a good deal of him.
“He doesn’t care for me. Why should he?” Eleanor had reflected sadly. “He likes Madeline because she’s clever about the same sort of things that he is interested in. And yet when he does come to see me, he looks and acts as if——”
And then Dick had telephoned about the box party. “It’s almost never that I can ask you to anything you really care about,” he had said, “so do say you’ll come this time.”
And when Eleanor had accepted, declaring that she always enjoyed doing things with him, he had taken her challenge. “Then I shall ask a pretty girl for your brother and two dull pairs of devoted people who won’t bother us. Remember it’s to be our very own party—only I can’t come for you because ‘The Quiver’ goes to press that night, and I shall have a form to ‘O. K.’ between seven and eight.”
Eleanor decided to wear her new yellow dress. At noon a huge bunch of violets arrived with Dick’s card. At three Jim sent a messenger for his evening clothes. He wouldn’t be able to get home to dinner. He might come for Eleanor at quarter to eight; if not, he would send a cab. Eleanor went across the street very early to the hotel where they took their dinners, and afterward slipped out of her street clothes and into a kimono, and curled up on the couch by the sitting-room fire to rest until it was time to dress for the evening. By and by she stretched luxuriously, sat up, and without turning on a light went down the hall to her room. As she felt for the electric switch a low angry growl sounded from within. It was Peter Pan, Jim’s new bulldog. He was feeling neglected, probably. Jim took him for a walk or romped with him indoors nearly every evening.
“Why, Peter!” Eleanor called persuasively. “Poor old Peter Pan! Were you lonely and bored and very cross?”