She threw out her arms again. His eyes, something of the heady spirits that she would perhaps have called sex attraction shining in them now, could see little more than those arms, the slim curves of her body in the sweater and short skirt, her eager glowing face and fine eyes. And his mind could see no more than his eyes.
An automobile horn sounded. He caught her arm and hurried her to the roadside. There were more of the large bare trees here; and a rail fence by which they stood.
“You say Zanin has given up the idea of coming to me with his plan?” He spoke guardedly, thinking that he must not betray the confidences of Betty and Hy.
“Yes, he has had to.”
“He spoke to me about it, once.”
“Yes, I know. But the man that is going to back him wants to do that part of it himself or have his own director do it.”
Pictures unreeled suddenly before his mind's eye—Sue, in “a pretty primitive costume,” exploited at once by the egotistical self-seeking Zanin, the unscrupulous, masterful Silverstone, a temperamental, commercial director! He shivered.
“Look here,” he began—he would fall back on his age and position; he would control this little situation, not drift through it!—“you mentioned my experience. Well, you're right. I've seen these Broadway managers with their coats off. And I've seen what happens to enthusiastic girls that fall into their hands.”
He hesitated; that miserable letter flashed on his brain. He could fairly see it. And then his tongue ran wild.
“Don't you know that Broadway is paved with the skulls of enthusiastic girls!... Silverstone? Why, if I were to give you a tenth of Silverstone's history you would shrink from him—you wouldn't touch the man's ugly hand. Here you are, young, attractive—yes, beautiful, in your own strange way!—full of a real faith in what you call the truth, on the edge of giving up your youth and your gifts into the hands of a bunch of Broadway crooks. You talk about me and the Broadway Thing. Good God, can't you see that it's girls like you that make the Broadway Thing possible!... You talk of my sentimentality about women, my 'home-and-mother-stuff,' can't you see the reason for that home-and-mother stuff, for that sentimentality, is the tens of thousands of girls, like you and unlike you who wanted to experiment, who thought they could make the world what they wanted it!”