"If I had met you in the end, alive and well," said Joan thoughtfully, "I would have kept you up there on your pedestal out of mortal reach but you came into my life, hurt and pitiful, and you needed help, my sort of help, and something humanized you. You were no longer a god. You were something human—"
"Thank God for that!" said Brian.
"Besides," added Joan, twinkling, "you had clay feet. Garry wrote me that you had an Irish temper—"
"And I told you to write him!"
"I asked him all about you," said Joan. "He wrote me such a splendid letter. It made me like you—more. And you can't know what it meant when you wrote and pledged yourself to help Don."
"Garry is my press agent," said Brian with a sniff, "I pay him. And I'll dock him for the part about my temper."
"Brian, so often I—I've wanted to thank you!"
"Don't," he begged. "Please don't. What I did—you see," he stammered, "it just—happened."
"Like the letter you wrote to me, praising someone else to guarantee your own respectability. Is it always someone else, Brian? Don't you ever think of yourself?"
"Lying here," said Brian moodily, "I've thought of little else. There's Hannah with the tablecloth. It can't be six o'clock."