"I beg your pardon," he said, "I'm looking for Mr. Adair?"
Phyllis saw before her a thin, dark, exceedingly well-dressed man of about forty, with an aquiline nose, a pale handsome face, and an air of noticeable distinction and importance.
"I'm sorry, but he has just gone out," she answered. "I am Mrs. Adair--will you not come in?"
He followed her into the sitting-room with a manner of such ease and good-breeding that Phyllis was suddenly transported back to her former existence, and tingled with a pleasurable curiosity.
"Perhaps I can do instead," she said, smiling, and offering the stranger a chair.
"Not only as well--but better," he returned. "If I had not heard about you I should not be here at all." He kept staring at her in a keen, questioning way with something of the penetration, and the appearance of inner mental working of some great specialist studying a patient. Though continuing to look at her, Phyllis could feel that those brilliant eyes had left nothing in the room unnoticed, and she realized with a twinge how pinched and shabby it all must seem to him.
"I am Rolls Reece, the dramatist," he observed at last. "It may be that you've never heard of me, though I hope you have--for it will facilitate matters."
Of course that name was familiar to Phyllis. Rolls Reece was the author of more successful plays than any man in America. He was the founder of a school--his own school--and to take a foreign word for which we have, no equivalent he was essentially a féministe. In representing nice women on the stage, women of refinement and position, he had a field in which he stood paramount. Not that he confined himself wholly to plays of this type, however. He was an indefatigable worker; with an ambition that balked at nothing; he was always reaching out, always trying experiments; a piece of his, Money, the King, had been strength and brutality personified.--That it was Rolls Reece who was before her filled Phyllis with a sudden and gratified astonishment.
"Certainly I know your name," she said. "Who is there that doesn't!"
He waved the compliment from him with a gesture of his hand--a hand as fine and small as a woman's. One invariably associated Rolls Reece with those fine, small hands, which, when he grew excited, gripped themselves on his chair with the tenacity of a sailor's in the rigging of a ship. It showed the importance he attached to this interview that he was already beginning to clench the furniture.