“There’s Jefferson who has our dramatic column—I’ll get him to give you a boost every now and then. He stands in with a bunch of critics. He’ll drop a word about you and they’re bound to take notice. You’ll see, darling, what I’m going to do for you!”
And she had put her vivid head on his shoulder and gazed down at the shining river and murmured that she didn’t care whether he did anything for her or not. She loved him—she didn’t want anything in the world but him.
The hall bedroom had given place to the third-story back, the frying chops to a French table d’hôte that boasted a bottle of red ink with a sixty-cent dinner, and Jane Goring was happy in the possession of a broad shoulder to weep on when the latest step came hard or the director asked casually if her legs were made of leather.
In the years that followed, the ardent young husband had made good his promises. He had systematically press-agented Goring with a sincerity and enthusiasm born of love. Untiringly he had worked to bring her first to managerial, then to public notice. And his efforts, added to natural talent and a bizarre personality, had hoisted her to the top rung heretofore mentioned. “Peacock” marked the fourth season of her success.
But long before that Bob McNaughton had awakened one morning to find gray hairs threading his brown, and [70] ]himself still a reporter—by no means a star one. He had been so busy making her career that he had forgotten to make his own.
It was about this time that his wife left him. Not actually left him, of course, for at that particular moment Goring would not have stooped to anything so disturbing as divorce. Waves of popular favor had begun to roll smoothly up the beach of her ambition. But her temperament demanded a home all her own. So they maintained separate apartments—had done so for several years—his a room and bath in a downtown bachelor hotel, hers a nine room and three-bath duplex in an uptown studio building.
In the beginning they had seen each other occasionally. But each time they met, Bob seemed to have grown grayer. Whether this fact was a reminder that her own hair, left to itself, might show the same tendency, or whether it was just the look in his eyes—the same look they had worn that Sunday on the Palisades—seeing him began to tell on her nerves.
More and more she denied herself to him until he became more of a stranger in her beautiful rooms than the flock of tame robins who pecked out of her hand at afternoon tea.
As a matter of fact, few of Goring’s vast throng of admirers even guessed there was a husband in the offing. Women persistently married her off to her handsome leading man, and more than one young millionaire about town ecstatically visualized her presiding at his dinner table.
So far as Jane Goring was concerned, Bob McNaughton [71] ]belonged to another life. Thus it was rather a shock to come home from the theater one night when “Peacock” was at the height of its run and find her husband waiting for her. It was fully five months since she had seen him; over a year since she had been at home to him after the theater.