Sue stood in the middle of the room, flushed, excited, a glowing picture from a Bakst album.
Mrs. Wilde, bewildered, struggling for speech, gazed at the outraged furniture.
Sue, catching a new sound, stared past her at a lanky figure of a man who stood at the screen door. Then with a sudden little cry, she rushed out to him. He opened the door and stepped within. Her arms flew around his neck. His arms held her close. He lifted her chin with a reverent hand, and kissed her lips. He did not know there was another person in the world.
Mrs. Wilde swept the children into a corner where they might not see.
“Sue,” she cried. “Are you crazy? Have you no sense—no shame?”
Sue threw hack her head, choked down a sound that might have been a laugh or a sob. Her eyes were radiant. “Thank God,” she cried—“None!”
CHAPTER XXXVII—REENTER MARIA TONIFETTI
IT was the opening of Peter Ericson (“Eric”,) Mann's new play, The Truffler, at the Astoria Theater on Broadway where the signs never fail and where to have your name blazoned in electric lights above a theater entrance is to be advertised to a restless but numerically impressive world. Peter's name was up there now. It was, you might have supposed, his big night. But Peter was not among the eight or nine hundred correctly dressed men and women that pressed in expectantly through the wide doorway. Instead, clad in his every-day garments, an expression of ill-controlled irritation on his lung face, moody dark eyes peering resentfully out through his large horn-rimmed glasses, he sat alone in the gallery, second row from the front, on the aisle.