The next night Miss Dounay gave John her forehead instead of her lips to kiss, but she heckled him no more, and it was perfectly obvious to him, as to Parks, that she helped him deliberately and had been helping him all along by her stage direction.
"If you've got her interested in you, you're fixed for life," grumbled Parks wistfully. "That girl's going up the line, and she's got stuff enough to take somebody else with her."
There was a suggestion in this which John resented.
"I'm going up, too," he rejoined with the defiant exuberance of youth, "but on my own steam."
Parks looked at John up and down, and laughed,—just that and nothing more. The old man's frankness was comforting at times; at others disagreeable. John moved away irritated, and his head went up into the clouds of his dreams. But there was something in what Parks had suggested that kept coming back to his mind. True, Miss Dounay never exchanged more than the merest words of courtesy with John off the stage. But on the stage and at rehearsal it really did seem as if there was a very nice little understanding growing up between them.
Off stage John dreamed of going to call upon her. In his little room he thought of her much and hungrily. That he should think hungrily was not strange, since he was hungry. His salary was twenty dollars a week. To send half to Rose, and save money to meet his wardrobe bills, he lived on two meals a day. The morning meal, taken at half-past nine, consisted of coffee and cakes, and cost ten cents. The evening meal was taken at half-past five. It was a grand course dinner that went from soup to pie, and its cost was fifteen cents. The tip to the waitress was a smile.
When one goes supperless to bed, dreams come lightly and are fantastic. John's dreams were of banqueting after the play with Marien Dounay. Greenroom gossip had it that Marien lived royally but in modest thrift; that her French maid, Julie, was also cook and housekeeper; that Marian's disposition was domestic and yet convivial. That instead of a supper down town in one of the brilliant cafés, she preferred the seclusion of her small but cozy apartment, and the triumphs of Julie at a tiny gas grill, supplemented and glorified by her own skill with the chafing dish. That there were nights when she supped alone, but others when a lady or two, or much more likely a gentleman, or mayhap two gentlemen were honored with invitations to this feast of goddesses; for tiny, efficient, ambidextrous Julie was in her way as much of an aristocrat as her mistress, and as skillful in imparting the suggestion that she was herself of some superior clay. Subject to the whims of her mistress, she, too, had whims, and made men—and women—not only respect but admire them. Rumor said that if an invitation to one of these midnight revels with toothsome food under the personal direction of this flashing beauty ever came, it was on no account to be despised, especially if a man were hungry either for beauty or for food.
John Hampstead was hungry for food, and now he began to feel hungry also for beauty. This last was really a new appetite. John, through all his struggling years, had of course his thoughts of woman as all men have, but vaguely, as something a long way off, indefinitely postponed. Yet ever since he carried Lygia in his arms, these thoughts of woman had been recurring as something nearer, more tangible, and more necessary even. As for that kiss in the garden scene of East Lynne! Well, there was something wonderfully awakening in that kiss. It was worlds different from that brotherly, sympathetic little kiss he had given Bessie yonder upon the rocks.
By the way,—why did Bessie cry? He used to wonder sometimes why she did! And why did Marien Dounay taunt him till he was angry enough to beat her,—and then kiss him?
Women were hard to understand. They seemed to do things that had no meaning; to use words not to convey but to conceal thought; and they spoke half their speeches in riddles. However, John reflected that when he had been with women more, he would know them better. And in the meantime he supplemented his professional contacts with Marien by thinking of her constantly, even to the point where his absorbing interest led him to follow her home at night after the play,—keeping always at a safe distance behind,—and to stand across the street and watch till the light went on in that third-story bay-window on Turk Street near Mason; and then still to stand, trying to interpret the meaning of shadows moving across the window for uncounted hours, till the light went out, sometimes at two and sometimes later, or until a policeman bade him move on. If any one had told John that he was falling in love with Marien Dounay, he would have indignantly rejected the idea. She held a fascinating interest for him,—that was all. Something basic in him was attracted by something basic in her, and he yielded to it wonderingly, experimentally almost, and that was all it amounted to.