Tyrrell Burton was the manager. It was all perfectly evident; it might even have been foreseen. Myrtle Manners and Gaya Jones had jumped at each other’s throat the second Jasper had left the city, and Tyrrell was trying to keep the better of the two. He knew that Myrtle’s part must be rewritten—it had become so top-heavy in her favor—and a new actress would want to start fresh, with the rôle more as it was first written. I was ashamed. My first thought had been that Myrtle had telegraphed for Jasper and that he was folding up the telegram so that I could not see it. I hoped he had not read my thoughts.
“Well?” he asked, impatiently.
In reaction, the tears had sprung into my eyes, and I stood there on the doorstep of our house and the threshold of our new life that was to be lived in it, crying. I had not yet had a chance to drink a cup of coffee and I had been up for hours.
Why is it that, no matter how bravely we face the future, how we seemingly have forgotten and, by every effort of the will and mind, have forgiven, still the thing we dread lies smoldering deep within us, a subdued but never an extinguished fire, ready at the first suspicion to leap into devouring flame? I had failed myself and my own faith more than Jasper.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He did not more than half understand me. He had not been thinking of me and my relationship to him; his mind had been racing to the problem of what in the world to do next with “The Shoals of Yesterday.”
“Well, if that is the way you feel about it,” he began, “I won’t go.”
“You must.”
The boy, tired of listening, swung his leg over the bicycle.
“Any answer?”