"Thank you," she faltered. "I must think."
"Good-by, Miss Linster."
Reaching the street in front of her apartment house, she turned just in time to see him disappear among the trees. He strode forward as if this were his world, and his days had been a continuous pageant of victories.... Her rooms were all cleared of disorder, her mind refreshed and stimulated.... That night between eleven and twelve she was writing to Charter. There were a half dozen penned pages before her, and a smile on her lips. She poured out a full heart to the big Western figure of cleanliness and strength—wrote to the man she wanted him to be.... The day had been strange and expanding. She had suffered no evil. The thoughts remaining with her from the talk in the Park were large with significance, and they had cleared slowly from the murkiness of their source. These, and the ideal of manhood she was building out of Charter's book and letter and Reifferscheid's little sketch of him, had made the hours rich with healing. She was tired but steady-nerved as she wrote.... There was a faint tapping at her hall-door.
FIFTH CHAPTER
PAULA IS INVOLVED IN THE FURIOUS HISTORY OF SELMA CROSS AND WRITES A LETTER TO QUENTIN CHARTER
Paula thrust the sheets of the letter in her desk drawer and admitted Selma Cross, an actress whose apartment was across the hall. These two had chatted together many times, sometimes intimately. Each had found the other interesting. Hints of a past that was almost classic in the fury of its struggle for publicity, had repeatedly come to Paula's ears, with other matters she greatly would have preferred not to hear. Selma Cross was huge to look upon, and at first thought without grace. There was something uncanny in her face and movements, and an extraordinary breadth between her yellow eyes which were wide-lidded, slow-moving and ever-changing. She was but little past thirty, yet the crowded traffic of her years was intricately marked.
"I saw the light under your door, and felt like coming in for a few minutes," she said. "I must talk to some one and my maid, Dimity, is snoring. You see, I'm celebrating for two reasons."
"Tell me, so I can help," Paula answered.
"Vhruebert has taken a play for me. You know, I've been begging him to for months. The play was made for me—not that it was written with me in mind, but that I just suit it. Selma Cross is to be carved in light over a theatre-entrance, twenty seconds from Broadway—next April. It will be at the Herriot—Vhruebert's theatre. We run through Hartford, Springfield, Rochester and that string of second cities earlier in the Spring."