She seemed rather tired, and he hoped this was not because she had made him come at an outrageously early hour and read her the beginning of his novel. He knew she was recasting it into scenes as he read; she got him to tell her all that he meant to do with it and, as they all, save Mrs. Hope, lighted their cigarettes over the coffee in the sitting-room, she began telling Wheeler about it.—Wheeler had dined there, too.
Christina's star was a big, stalwart man of about fifty, who had not quite ceased to be a matinée idol in becoming one of the foremost of producers. He listened with a good deal of interest and indeed the story lost nothing on Christina's tongue; Herrick began to see that her mind was a highly sensitized plate which could catch reflections even of disembodied things. Then Wheeler exclaimed what an actor's approval has to say first, whatever he may bring himself to deal with afterward. "Why, but there's a play in that!"
"Yes," said Christina, promptly. "For me!"
Humor shone out of the good sense and good feeling of Wheeler's heavy, handsome face. "Give me more coffee, my cormorant! Do you think I want to play the young lady myself? Nay, 'I know the hour when it strikes!'—heavy fathers for mine! Stouter than I used to be—Tut-tut, no sugar!—There will be too much of me—Did you get your idea of moral responsibility out of New England, Mr. Herrick?"
"Well, this form of it I got from such a different source as a very suave, amiable Italian, Emile Gabrielli, an intending author, too,—a lawyer who had exiled himself to Switzerland. Do you know a line of Howell's?—'The wages of sin is more sinning.' And it's seemed to me that the more-sinning doesn't stop with ourselves; it draws the most innocent and indifferent people into our net. Well, I always wanted to find a vehicle for that notion."
"And your Italian told you this story?"
"Something like it. Set the tone for it, too, in a way. He was a highly respectable sentimental person, and used to carry about an old miniature of a lovely girl to whom, I believe, he had once been betrothed. The bans had been forbid by cruel parents but he used to brag to me, at fifty, that they could never force him to part from her idolized face! Yet he knew so many shady stories I've often wondered if he hadn't left home in order to avoid a circle of too embarrassing clients. At any rate he had known a woman whose husband had got into trouble with the police in Italy—for swindling, I think he said. She had to clear out and disappeared. Years afterward he found that she had run into the arms of a respectable, God-fearing family; the natural prey of cheats because years before their little daughter had been kidnapped or lost and never found. They cry out at this young woman's resemblance to the child; the young woman puts two and two together into a story which deceives those who wish to be deceived, and settles down to be taken care of for the rest of her life. It must have been any port in a storm, for I didn't gather her adopted family had money. Spent all they had in looking for her when she was a baby, as I understood. To Signor Gabrielli the cream of the jest was that this girl was being petted and cherished and labored for by industrious people who would have perished of horror if they had known who she was, and who had not one drop of their blood in her veins.—I may not have got the incidents at all straight, but that's the idea."
"But you've changed the relationship—?"
"Oh, yes. I've cut down the family to a daughter and, as you see, I've reversed the parts—in my story it is the daughter who is deceived; it is the supposed mother who settles down upon the devoted innocence and labor of a generous girl."
"Oh, of course!" exclaimed Mrs. Hope. "Put it all on the mother! Nowadays, everything's sure to be her fault!"