"Oh, Lord, don't say that again, Reece. If anybody on this mortal earth ever wanted to, it's me."
"Not another word then. You're satisfied and so am I; and if you should ever feel discouraged, remember there are only about thirteen men in America who can act, and you are one of them, and not the last, either. Let's call in that charming wife of yours, and see if she doesn't agree with me."
Rolls Reece secured a six weeks' engagement for Adair in a play of his called The Upstarts, that was touring Washington, Baltimore, Syracuse, Cincinnati, and what are called the near-by cities. The hundred and fifty dollars a week seemed a veritable fortune, though it was judged wiser to husband it by letting Phyllis remain in New York, and thus save the heavy traveling expenses that would otherwise have been incurred for her. The dormice had learned the value of money with a vengeance. Adair himself, once the most careless of spenders, now showed an economy that was laughable and pathetic. He foreswore cigars; lived in the cheapest of cheap boarding-houses; grudged every penny that could be saved. There was to be no more shingle for dormice, but a warm little nest lined with green bills, from which, in hard times, they could put out their little noses unafraid.
Rolls Reece expected to secure him another engagement with a western company to fill in the summer months; and with such an agent enlisted in his service the most spendthrift of actors needed to have taken no thought for the future. But Adair, who never did anything by halves, was cautious to the point of penury. He was determined Phyllis should never suffer such privations again, and those who called him miserly and mean little suspected the reasons that made him appear so. Phyllis herself was kept in the dark lest she should emulate his example; and the savings-bank account rose and rose without her having the least knowledge of it. The equivalent of cabs, good dinners, cigars, wine, expensive rooms, and Pullman berths stacked themselves in that yellow pass-book, and bore witness to a stoical self-denial. No more shingles for dormice, thank you!
In spite of the separation Phyllis was not unhappy during those long, silent days. Spring was in the air, and her heart, too, basked in that inner sunshine of contentment and hope. Like a weary little soldier she was glad to rest on the battlefield beside the parked cannon, and enjoy the contemplation of victory. Body and soul had been sorely tried; the reaction left both in a sweet languor; it was pleasant to do nothing; to lie back dreaming.
Rolls Reece came often to see her, and many a day they spent in his big motor racing over the snowy landscape of Long Island or Westchester County. He sent her flowers; he was assiduous in the little attentions women like; he was always so cheerful, so helpful, so kind. For him it was an intimacy that might have had a dangerous ending. He was perilously near falling desperately in love with Phyllis, and the latter never showed more address than in the way she guided him past the rock on which their friendship might have foundered. She was quite frank about it--disarmingly frank. She liked him too well to lose him, and told him so, and was prettily imperious with him, and yet never provocative nor coquettish. A man and woman friendship is nothing without sentiment, but it has to be a loyal, tender sentiment, that can cause neither the least self-reproach. Rolls Reece slipped by the rock unhurt, admiring as he did so the adroitness of the young beauty whom he knew had grown so fond of him. As to that there was never any question--it was self-confessed--and being a man he was naturally flattered and pleased.
But he was high-bred, sensitive, clever, and innately a gentleman, with an unusual perception, and a taste for the rarer and finer qualities of women. Others in his place might have persevered harder, and then turned sullen. He did neither. Indeed, Phyllis' whole love-story, as it came out by degrees, touched him profoundly. Her audacity, her daring, her blind reckless headlong surrender to the man that had captivated her--all these to him were more than moving. A woman that could stake everything for love was altogether to Rolls Reece's taste. And Phyllis had not only staked everything, but had succeeded in the more difficult task of making love endure and grow. There were many subjects on which she knew nothing; she could not have told the name of the vice-president, and she thought the Balkans were in South America, but when it came to love the dramatist was amazed at her profundity. On this topic, however, the one topic that seriously interested her, she had an insight and a knowledge, not to speak of a whole whimsical vocabulary that made Reece appreciate his own shortcomings. Love, passion, sex--these were the real things of life and that demure brown head was insatiably concerned with them.
Of course, the new play, too, came in for an endless amount of talk and discussion. It was to be called The Firebrand, and every few days Rolls Reece had a little sheaf of manuscript to read to her. It dealt with a young man, who, in the whirl of politics, had secured the place of a police-court magistrate in a low quarter of Chicago. The suffering, misery and injustice thus passing in review before him, first startles and then rouses a nature passionately sympathetic and humane. His decisions are original, picturesque, and conventions are torn to pieces. He clashes with the boss who has put him into office, and defies him. The young judge makes enemies right and left; alienates the family of the girl he is engaged to; is sold up at auction through liabilities assumed on behalf of a children's society he has started.
The boss leads in the machinations to ruin him, which is made the easier by the firebrand's own hot-headedness and indiscretion; the third act is in an assignation house where the judge is trapped. He explains his innocence to his triumphant tormentors; he tells of the half-grown girl he has trailed there, and appeals, with a fine outburst, to their humanity to help him save her; the boss refuses, and taunts him with the scandal that next day will shake Chicago. Then the judge plays his trump card, and tells them what he had been trying to hold back, that the girl is no other than the boss' own daughter; and smashing open a door discloses her and the satyr, who has brought her there. This, in brief, was the play, shorn of all its externals--an intense, powerful, essentially modern play, brutally real, and yet animated by a burning purpose, and a resentment no less fiery against the diabolical misgovernment of our large cities.
Rolls Reece labeled it "dangerous goods," which in truth it was, and was correspondingly uplifted. He said he was tired of writing sugar-candy plays, and wished to show his detractors that he could grapple with big emotions as well as the lesser, pink-tea femininities with which his name was always associated. "And remember, Mrs. Adair," he explained, "I don't want a goody-goody young man with a benevolent forehead and a spotless past, and a Y.M.C.A. accent--but an impatient, chip-on-his-shoulder, impulsive fellow, who would like to get off the bench and fight somebody. It's a Cyril Adair play, and I am going to fit him as carefully as a Fifth Avenue tailor. And on the police-court judge side of it, I am going to show the public the colossal power those men have for good or evil. They can blight more human lives in one morning than the whole Supreme Court could do in ten years. In their dingy little field they are absolute monarchs, from which there is no appeal. We owe thousands of criminals to their crass stupidity, and when they work in collusion with corrupt politicians they are a scourge and a terror to every decent man or woman in their midst."