Miss Adair was as good as her word. She accepted the reveling crowd of the garden, looked upon the abandon of drinking women and men, with only a slightly hunted expression in her eyes, and with her slim white hands applauded Simone when that artist made most audacious slings of her supple body in its scant clothing. She beamed upon the dancer when, as Mrs. Trevor, she came, at Mr. Farraday's invitation, to have a glass of champagne with them, and she quailed only once, when a band of extremely young girls, clothed in filmy garments, took tiny search-lights and went merrily hunting among the tables of laughing men and women after the lights had been put out for the sport. Her horror at observing Mr. Vandeford, who sat between her and the narrow aisle take various moneys from his pocket to defend himself from successive hunters, made her pale, and the moment the lights were flashed on again she rose to go.
"Wonder what they'll do next," muttered Mr. Farraday, as he helped her into her wrap. Mr. Vandeford was not looking at his author or speaking. Once when he had put his hand in his pocket to get out a coin for one of the teasing girls with her search-light he had felt the Y. W. C. A. latch-key there, and it had short-circuited him entirely.
"I know you are tired. It takes some time to get the New York pace, but you'll strike it. I think I'll stay to see the next Folly with Mr. Farraday," he heard the Violet saying to Miss Adair, and still short-circuited, he went with his calm young author down to the car. The hour was one-thirty, and a moon had climbed the heights of the Broadway cañon. Valentine, with some sort of psychic direction, went across Central Park and down wide, clean, silent, and dimly lighted Fifth Avenue. Both Mr. Vandeford and Miss Adair were silent, and he was not aware that she was crying until just before they turned into her side street.
"They were so young, those girls, and they—they didn't want to—to do that," she said with little catches in her beautiful, slurring, Blue-grass voice.
"Maybe they didn't; but they wouldn't go back now, not one," he answered her.
She was silenced, and stood quiet beside him as he opened the door of the big, gloomy, protective building, with the key the woman of another world than his had intrusted to him.
"I know," she said at last, as she held out her hand to him. And because it trembled ever so slightly and was cold, he put his warm lips to it for a second before he handed her into a great international safety. He remembered the key, but he didn't give it to her. Somehow he wanted it himself. He liked the feel of it in his pocket.
"Wish I had Denny locked up in [the] Christian association!" he growled to himself as Valentine whirled him home.
Just at that exact moment Mr. Dennis Farraday sat in Miss Violet Hawtry's Louis Quinze parlor at the Claridge, engaged in tenderly and awkwardly patting that star's sobbing white shoulder, as she lay on just such a couch as Manon Lescaut probably had had for just such scenes.
"I don't blame him at all," sobbed Miss Hawtry, provocatively, with the art of long practice both on the stage and off. "My kind always loses to hers when the time comes."