"And I got a hunch you'd make good all the way. You've got things nobody else on the screen's got but my little woman, d'y'see, and it wouldn't be no time at all, maybe, before you'd be a star with your own company. I'll take care of that, you wouldn't have to worry about the money end of it at all, d'y'see——"
"But what if I don't want to be a motion-picture actress, Mr. Culp?"
"Well, of course, if you don't, that's different." He pondered gloomily this incomprehensible freak. "Lis'n," he suggested, brightening: "Tell you what, Mrs. Druce: you go home and think it over. You got all night and most of tomorrow—you won't be comin' here to look at the tests till five o'clock, d'y'see—and if you should want to change your mind, I stand back of all I said. All you got to do is say yes, and walk right into a nice part, fit you like a glove, in the next Alma Daley pitcher——"
"Seriously, Mr. Culp; if I should think it over for a month, my decision would be the same. But thank you ever so much—and please thank Mrs. Culp for me, too."
"Well," Culp said reluctantly, holding the street door, "if that's the way you feel about it ... well, of course.... G'dnight, Mrs. Druce, and pleas't'meet you."
The street was dark with a gentle darkness kind to eyes that still ached and smarted. And the frosty air was grateful to one coming from the close atmosphere of the studio, heavy with its composite smell of steam-heated paint and dust and flesh.
And crossing to her car, Lucinda experienced a vagary of vivid reminiscence. Just for an instant the clock was turned back for her a dozen years and more, she was again a little girl, a child bringing dazed eyes of dream from the warm and scented romance of a matineé, her thrilled perceptions groping mutinously toward reconciliation with the mysterious verities of streets mantled in blue twilight.
That passed too quickly, too soon she was Lucinda Druce once more, grown up and married, disillusioned....
And with a shiver of pain Lucinda realized anew what the afternoon with its unsought boons of novelty and diversion had made her for hours on end forget, the secret dolour of her heart.