I knew better too than to attempt any sort of staginess with Eversley; I said the words, trying to understand them, and let the part have its way with me. It was not until we had laid down the book that I remembered I was still waiting judgment, and did not feel to want it.
"I won't take up any more of your time," I suggested. "You have been very good to me." I got up to go. After all what was there that Eversley could do for me.
"Well," he said, "and is it to be musical comedy?"
"No," I told him, "no, it may be starvation or the lake, but I'll not let myself down like that.... Was that why you asked me to do the part?" I said after a while, in which he had sat gazing into the fire without taking any note of my standing.
"Sit down," he said. "Have you ever heard of Polatkin?"
I shook my head and sat provisionally on the edge of my chair.
"Polatkin is a speculator; he speculates in ability. I think on the whole the best thing I can do for you is to introduce you to Polatkin."
Mr. Eversley thought of Morris Polatkin because he had met him the day before in Chicago. Before I left the hotel it was arranged that I was to see him the next day, and if he liked me—by the tone in which Mark Eversley spoke of him I knew that was foregone—he would take me on to New York with him and put my gift on a paying basis.
So suddenly had the release from strain come that I found myself toppling over my own resistance. I went out in the street and walked about until reminded by the gnawing in my stomach, that I had had nothing but the brewing of my twice-boiled coffee grounds for breakfast, I turned into the first attractive café and paid out almost my last cent for a comforting luncheon. It would have gone farther if I had bought food and cooked it at home, but I was past that. I had pinched and endured to the last pitch; I could no more. And besides the assurance of Mark Eversley, which as yet I could scarcely believe in, there had come a strange new courage upon me. For as I had suffered and struggled with Magda, suddenly from some high unknowable source, power descended. I had felt it fluttering low like a dove, hovering over me; it had perched on my spirit. I could feel it there now brooding about me with singing noises. It had come back! I rushed to meet it as to a lover.
As I walked back to my lodging, a flood of hopes, half shapes of conquests and surmises, bore me like a widening flood apart from all that the last few months stood for. Suddenly at the door I realized how far it had carried me from Griffin; the figure of him was faint in my mind as one seen from the farther shore. I considered a little and then I wrote him a note and slipped it under the door. I went out again, and walked aimlessly all the rest of the afternoon, and when it was dark I stole softly up to my room again, but he heard me. He came knocking almost immediately, full of the appearance of rejoicing, but even the dusk didn't conceal from me that embarrassment was on him. He looked checked and confounded as when he had told me about his relation to Miss Dean, like a man caught in an unwarrantable assumption. Whatever Dean had done to him, it had broken the back of his egotism completely. He knew well enough he had no business with a woman like me, a friend of Mark Eversley's, and he was ashamed to have been caught thinking he had. He sidled and fluttered for an interval, making up his mind to a resumption of affectionateness, and finally making it up that he couldn't, and remembering an engagement somewhere for the evening.