"If you would show him this card," I begged. "Perhaps he would make an appointment." She recognized the writing on the card, and I saw her relenting. Mr. Eversley, it proved, would see me.
He pretended kindly to have recognized me at once, but he didn't ask after the Hardings. He saw that it was the last lap with me.
"My dear Miss Lattimore, sit here. Now, tell me."
"So," I concluded at the end of half an hour, "I thought you could tell me if it is all gone. If I am never to have it back again, I can go with a musical comedy." I hadn't told him, of course, what the conditions were of my having even that, "but if you think it could be brought back again ..." I could hardly formulate a hope beyond that.
"Never in the old way," he answered promptly. "You wouldn't wish that. What you did at twenty you must not wish to do at thirty, for then there is no growth. What do you really feel about it?"
"I feel," I said, "as if I could do something—something pressing to be done, but somehow different, so different that I do not know how to describe it to anybody nor to get them to believe in it."
"And so you have begun to doubt it yourself?"
"I shall believe you," I said.
He sat still after that for a while, staring into the open fire and rubbing his fine expressive hands together in a meditative way. It was good to me to see him, just touched mellowly with age, the delicate carving in his face of nobility and gentleness. There were men like that then, men who made by their mere being, something more than a shibboleth of the traditional dependability. He seemed to be far away from me, groping around the root of truth in respect to that gift with which he was so richly endowed. He rose presently and took a play-book which lay face downward on the table.
"Could you do a bit of this with me?" he suggested. "It will help me get my lines." The play was "Magda," new then on the American stage. Eversley was getting up the part of Colonel Schwartz. He explained the story to me a little and I began reading and prompting him. Presently I felt the familiar click of myself sliding into the part. All my winter in Chicago rose up in the part of Magda to protest against the judgment of Taylorville.