Why the elusiveness, dear boy? I called you up three times. I hope it was accidental that I couldn't reach you, though it looks bad for poor Sophie, since you never tried to get in touch with me as you promised. Or did you?
Well, I'm here with the show in Montreal. They decided to get us ready up here among our own land before springing us upon the Yankees. But it's so lonesome. Christy is such a bore.
We open in New York a week from to-night. Times Square Theatre. How about a party after the show? I can get some of the other girls if you like. But would prefer just us two. You know—like the good old days in London. I miss you dreadfully, dear boy. Do drive my blues away as soon as I get back to the U.S.A. Be nice to me. And write.
Your loving
SOPHIE.
Rodrigo smiled wryly as he folded up the letter and slipped it into his pocket. He had received scores of such communications from Sophie. He had been used to replying to them in kind. He had seldom been temperate in his letters to her. He rather prided himself upon the amount of nonsense he was able to inject into plain black ink. That had been the trouble in the case of his billets doux to Rosa Minardi.
But he was not thinking of Rosa at the present moment. It had occurred to him that some use might be made of the invitation in the pink letter in connection with the promise he had made to Henry Dorning to broaden John's horizon. By Jove, he would take up Sophie's suggestion for a party on the night of the New York opening of the Christy Revue. He would invite John and another of Sophie's kind to accompany them. Pretty, thrill-seeking Sophie—she was certainly a great little horizon-broadener. And he would leave it to her to pick from the Christy company another coryphee of similar lightsomeness.
He resolved to set the ball rolling at once and, the rest of his mail unread, rose and started into the neighboring office. Opening the door of John's sanctum, he stopped for a moment to view the tableau inside.
Two blond heads were bent absorbedly over a letter on John's desk, a man's and a woman's. They were talking in low voices, and Mary Drake's pencil was rapidly underscoring certain lines in the letter. She was advancing an argument in her soft, rapid voice, evidently as to how the letter should be answered. John was frowning and shaking his head.
Rodrigo, standing watching them, wondered why they were not in love with each other. Here was the sort of woman John needed for a wife. Though he could not catch her exact words, he gathered that she was trying to influence him to answer this letter in much more decided fashion than he had intended. That was Mary Drake all over. Thoroughly business-like, aggressive, looking after John's interests, bucking him up at every turn. That was the trouble as far as love was concerned. John regarded her as a very efficient cog in the office machinery rather than as a woman. And yet she was very much of a woman. Underneath the veneer of almost brusqueness, there was a tender stratum, as Rodrigo thought he had discovered in her unguarded moments. Love could be awakened in Mary Drake by the right man, and it would be a very wonderful sort of love.
Rodrigo asked himself if he really wanted John Dorning to be the awakener. Something in his own heart seemed to protest. Watching her, a feeling of tenderness for her swept over him. He had never again sought jauntily to flirt with her as he had attempted to do that first day he met her. A deeper feeling for her, such as he had never experienced before for any woman, was being slowly kindled within him. And this feeling was steadily growing deeper as she began admitting him to her friendship on much the same status that John Dorning enjoyed.