“I guess he is if he’s like his father!” she returned. “I am trying to get a lot, though, out of him, and when you asked me to dine to-night I said to myself, ‘I’ll accept, for it will be a good time to ask Mr. Blair to help me out in what I want to do.’”
At Ruggles’ face she smiled sweetly and said graciously:
“Oh, don’t think I wouldn’t have come anyway. But I’m awfully tired these days, and going out to supper is just one thing too much to do! I want Mr. Blair,” she said, turning to Ruggles as if she knew a word from him would make the thing go through, “to help me build a rest home down on the English coast, for girls who get discouraged in their art. When I think of the luck I have had and how these things have been from the beginning, and how money has just poured in, why,” she said ardently, “it just makes my heart ache to think of the girls who try and fail, who go on for a little while and have to give up. You can’t tell,”—she nodded to Ruggles, as though she were herself a matron of forty,—“you can not tell what their temptations are or what comes up to make them go to pieces.”
Ruggles listened with interest.
“I haven’t thought it all out yet, but so many come to me tired out and discouraged, and I think a nice home taken care of by a good creature like my Higgins, let us say, would be a perfect blessing to them. They could go there and rest and study and just think, and perhaps,” she said slowly, as though while she spoke she saw a vision of a tired self, for whom there had been no rest home and no place of retreat, “perhaps a lot of them would pull through in a different way. Now to-day”—she broke her meditative tone short—“I got a letter from a hospital where a poor thing that used to sing with me in New York was dying with consumption—all gone to pieces and discouraged, and there is where your primroses went to—” she nodded to Dan. “Higgins took them. You don’t mind?” And Blair, with a warmth in his voice, touched by her pity more than by her charity, said:
“Why, they grew for you, Miss Lane; I don’t care what you do with them.”
Letty Lane sank her head on her hands, her elbows leaned on the table. She seemed suddenly to have lost interest even in her topic. She looked around the room indifferently. The orchestra was softly playing The Dove Song from Mandalay, and very softly under her breath the star hummed it, her eyes vaguely fixed on some unknown scene. To Dan and to Ruggles she had grown strange. The music, her brilliancy, her sudden indifference, put her out of their commonplace reach. Ruggles to himself thought with relief:
“She doesn’t care one rap for the boy anyway, thank God. She’s got other fish to land.”
And Dan Blair thought: “It’s my infernal money again.” But he was generous at heart and glad to be of service to her, and was perfectly willing to be “touched” for her poor. Then two or three men came up and joined them. She greeted them indolently, bestowing a word or a look on this one or on that; all fire and light seemed to have gone out of her, and Dan said:
“You are tired. I guess I had better take you home.”