"But, Mr. Nolan, I'm sure, if you'll just think a moment you'll see it isn't natural for a girl like Nelly to rant like a tragedy queen over this situation. She'd be hurt, I grant you, and she'd be angry, angry with herself as much as with Richards, but she wouldn't tear around in this corner like a—like Lillian Gish in Broken Blossoms when's she's trapped in the scullery and her father's breaking in to murder her. Don't you see?"
"Sure I see." Nolan spoke with an unwonted evenness of tone, for him; but the tone was ugly. "I see a lot of things. I see you've made up your mind to try to make a fool of me, arguing about my visualization of this scene like you have. I see you're dead-set on making me so mad I'll give up my job rather than go on trying to make an actress out of screen-struck near-society dame. Well, all right, you win. I resign. I'm out. You've got your wish. And this time I don't come back, not if you was to go down on your knees to beg me to finish this fool picture!"
In an abrupt break of fury, oddly out of keeping with the level tone he had used, Nolan raised the megaphone above his head and with all his might cast it upon the floor at Lucinda's feet.
"And that ends that," he announced quietly, and walked off, leaving Lucinda in a temper curiously divided between relief and regret. For this time, she was sure, Nolan meant it.
XXXVI
At a late hour that afternoon the war council of the incorporators of Linda Lee Inc. stalled on dead centre.
Prolonged discussion had failed to suggest any means of salvaging the argosy of their fortunes from speedy foundering. No sort of success had rewarded the quest of a navigator at once competent and free to take command of the venture which Nolan had bungled and abandoned; so far as could be determined, there was none such at liberty. And when Lucinda had once more iterated her unshakable refusal to countenance overtures looking toward the reinstatement of Nolan, silence spellbound the four gathered together in that tiny, ill-furnished room which served Lontaine as an office, the silence of spiritual discouragement and mental enervation.
Fanny alone seemed quick with an elfin fire which enabled her to skim lightly the surface of that slough of despond in which the others were one and all so sadly bogged. Perched on the writing-bed of Lontaine's war-worn desk, she sat swinging pretty legs in the space between the pedestals, and smoking a cigarette, her abstracted but amused gaze roving out through the single window, the most elusive and illegible of smiles flickering about her paint-smeared lips.
Against an end of the desk leaned Iturbide—bidden to the conference because of his wide and intimate knowledge of directors—with hands plunged deep into trouser pockets, his oval face of olive tint wearing that sullen cast which in the Latin is so often indicative of nothing worse than simple thoughtfulness.