Thurley did not see much of Lissa or Mark for the next few weeks. Perhaps Lissa deemed it wiser not to encourage Thurley’s becoming one of her protÉgÉes because of Mark,—at least, until Thurley was a prima donna and her mind busied with many things. At the present time Thurley was amenable to all new faces and suggestions. Had she permitted her to be more with Mark than was customary who knows but what the result would spell disaster for Lissa’s contentment. Let Thurley taste of fame as Lissa had, for a short time, tasted, and she knew no mere individuals could claim her attention as they might now.

Neither did Thurley see Sam Sparling nor Ernestine for they were on tour. Sam sent her a doll, a wonderful, fluffy-skirted young lady doll with her brown hair combed modishly, bits of kid gloves reaching to the dimpled, wax elbows and a paste brilliant necklace. The accompanying card read, “Thurley Precore, prima donna, from an old beau!” And when Thurley audaciously took the doll to Hobart’s studio the next lesson hour, Hobart pretended to give the lesson to the doll and not Thurley, saying in conclusion,

“As no one else is here, Thurley, I can lecture you all I like and say what I really think—how charming you look in that costume—but please don’t listen to Lissa’s nonsense, you’ll hear enough of it presently. Kid gloves, too! I declare if Sam hasn’t lost his old heart—”

“Why not listen to Lissa?” asked Thurley, imitating a doll’s shrill voice.

“Because you must choose the straight, narrow path of hard work and a terrific loneliness of soul if your success is to be lasting and independent of others. You may bestow your affections on some one as a gracious favor—after you have made for yourself your public place—but never listen to what such women as Lissa chatter about—or such women as you will meet in the opera house. You will see them come and go, quickly appearing and more rapidly disappearing and that is because they have followed Lissa’s logic.”

“But please,” still imitating the doll’s voice, “what in the world am I to do? I’ve promised never to marry any one and I’m sure I won’t love any one I cannot marry. I’m not keen on slum work and I don’t choose cigarettes and Persian kitties for my home atmosphere as Ernestine does—nor attics like Polly.”

Hobart’s face was grave. “Some day, we will talk about things and I will tell my secrets—but not yet, you are too young and flushed with dreams.” He stopped speaking to the doll as he added, “You must tramp abroad with Ernestine this summer; Miss Clergy may go or not as she wishes. But when you return you are to start rehearsals for your dÉbut.”

Thurley looked at him for a long, glorious moment. After all, it had been worth the winter’s work and bewildering experiences. To make her dÉbut—would she ever forget the day in the stableyard of the Hotel Button when Dan engaged her to sing at his circus, rival to the “great swinging man”—and she had told him then that some day she was to sing before great audiences—maybe earning as much as a dollar a night!

“I’m not ready,” she began.

“You will be—stage directions, a good maid, a press agent, Santoza’s coaching and a little polishing here and there. I told you the first day you sang for me that God had taught you how to sing, man merely teaching you what.”

“Abroad—London—Paris—Spain—” Thurley began to whisper. “It’s true—isn’t it?—say that it is—,” dancing up to him, her eyes like stars.

“Don’t be too happy,” he suggested almost testily, “I can’t bear to see it!”

“Why not?” she was the aggrieved, wild-rose child speaking her mind regardless of the person who was listening. “Because you are not happy?”

“No, because you must find out sooner or later that each life is given so much happiness, pain, cowardice, bravery, all attributes and emotions, the same as we are physically endowed with so much eyesight, hearing, power of locomotion, and when you realize that and know that when you burn up all the joy and ecstasy of unthinking youth, there is nothing, nothing that can ever cause such joy to exist again or give one such an abandon of mirth—all the rest of life snails on in gray patterns—I’d like to have you save your joy for things more worth while than this, distribute it so it will last through the gray days, Thurley!”

Looking at him, Thurley saw that his face was a dangerous, shiny white as if he had been ill a long time and his eyes were deadish, burnt-out things.

“I am sorry,” she began impulsively, “that you’ve no joy left—”

Hobart recalled himself and began pointing out errors in her last song. They did not go beneath the surface again during the lesson. When it was finished, Hobart said November would probably be the month of her dÉbut,—not in “Faust” as she had fondly imagined but as the vivacious Rosina in “The Barber of Seville”; protest all she liked, Rosina it was to be.

“That is nearly seven months away,” he said, looking out at the April sky. “Ernestine writes she will be home by June and you will start soon after. You must be back by the middle of September—however, that gives you quite a holiday. From now on, Thurley, I shall not see you—” he held out his hand but she did not seem to notice.

“Where are you going?”

“London, to superintend some pantomime things and opera. I’ll be back in June but not until you have sailed; we’ll almost be ships passing in the night. But I’ll be here in September to hear you tell of the Old World as seen by two very blue eyes. To-morrow you will please go to Santoza for coaching. You don’t like him and he likes no one save his gnarled old self—he has seen too many women play hob with too many men ever to like the loveliest of beginners. But he will teach you all you need to know and Antone will take you for the singing hour. If Lissa suggests that she coach you, ward her off. Now, my little prodigy, good-by and a happy summer.”

Still Thurley did not take his hand. “Where do you go from June until September?” she demanded.

Hobart neither glowered nor started as she anticipated. He laughed and patted her shoulder, whispering, “Ah, that would be telling—”

Some one tapped at his door and Thurley, perforce, tore herself away.

She would not see Bliss Hobart for nearly seven months ... seven months ... then she would make her dÉbut! Well, if she could glean from Ernestine bits of her philosophy and from Polly her contagious jollity and add a trifle of Lissa’s purring loveliness—and she became as famous as her own voice could make any one—perhaps even Bliss Hobart might be tempted to say where he disappeared each year!

Thurley was planning a startling series of events between herself and Bliss Hobart as she left the building, trying not to let tears crowd her blue eyes or betray she was perturbed.... Santoza, hateful ogre with dirty, yellow hands, absurd, striped clothes and long, greasy hair, always mumbling to himself in Italian—she must study with Santoza and have those yellow, soiled fingers whirl angrily in the air as he tried to explain wherein she was in error and with Antone, that cynical little dandy with no more heart than flint, who stared at her through half-closed lids and only ridiculed, never praised!

Then Thurley resolved a dangerous but very feminine thing. Had she but known, many other younger and lovelier women than herself had resolved the same thing regarding Bliss Hobart. She would make him care for her! Not even Miss Clergy’s vow should prove an obstacle. She would make him care ... after that was an undetermined stage of rapture, a new and alluring sort of ooze in which to take refuge after hateful hours with Santoza and Antone and wondering moments as to what Hobart was doing and where he hid for his summer holiday! Thurley would make him care. Having achieved that, she would then employ Lissa’s theories as a vaulting pole to take her well over the handicap which Miss Clergy fancied she had forever placed in the way of romantic love.

No woman had yet succeeded. This Thurley did not know; like all the others she was sure that she was to prove the exception.

She worked with Antone and Santoza cultivating an attitude of indifference to offset their unpleasant personalities. Miss Clergy, in her squirrel cage of a world, looked on with pleased but feeble eyes and told Thurley she must go abroad with Ernestine Christian.

“You’ll come, too?” Thurley begged. “You must not stay so alone. All you do is to drive and read—and you do read the same books over and over—and talk with me a little and sleep a great deal. When I drag you into a shop you are as timid as can be and you won’t meet people though I’ve coaxed and begged. Please come with us—think of France, Spain, Italy,” Thurley hurried on to produce many new and tempting arguments.

Miss Clergy shook her head. “He came from Italy,” she said. “I could not bear it.”

Remorseful, undecided what was best to say, Thurley stood back abashed. “Oh, don’t let it hurt for so long—you’ve burnt up all your joy,” recalling Hobart’s words.

Miss Clergy waved Thurley off. “I’ll go to a rest cure,” she decided. “Now be off, my head is starting to ache.”

Still Thurley hesitated. “You won’t go back to the Corners?” she asked.

Miss Clergy gave a cackling laugh. “Don’t worry, Thurley, I’d not go back even to dance at Dan Birge’s wedding.”

Thurley left the room. She tried Ernestine’s antidote for heart stirrings as she practised scales, louder and louder in more and more glorious a voice until Miss Clergy fell asleep, happy at heart—for had she not at the eleventh hour saved a genius from mediocrity and secured revenge for her withered tragedy?

The first Sunday morning in May, Polly Harris appeared to carry Thurley off, first to her attic to retrieve something she had forgotten, and next to Collin Hedley’s garden and chÂteau a few miles up the Hudson.

“I knew this wasn’t lesson day and so I was sure you would come along. Wear something old because Collin’s place is one of those shabby-elegant affairs where new costumes seem vulgar. I think the only time when Lissa is ever uncomfortable is at Collin’s garden parties, but she has to come because she is jealous of Mark and there she is, a great, painted doll among real things.”

Polly audaciously danced about Miss Clergy’s rooms while Thurley hurried into her blue serge with a flat, black sailor. Polly kept up a pleasing conversation with Miss Clergy as to Thurley’s dÉbut and the proposed trip abroad, the wonderful things Bliss had been doing in London and what a jolly world it was anyhow, actually tucking an extra pillow behind Miss Clergy’s back and leaving her the last issue of a shocking art journal as her proper Sabbath reading. Hobart had truly prophesied that when Polly went to heaven she would be given the position of keeping every one chirked up when things promised to be a trifle ponderous.

“Let’s be ordinary critters and fly down to my sky parlor on a Fifth Avenue ’bus,” she proposed. “I pay the fares,” jingling her coin purse.

“Oh, no, Polly,” Thurley interposed. Thurley did not comprehend what Ernestine had tried to impress so carefully upon her—that Polly was not yet defeated, that she must be careful lest she hint of the opinions of the family which were that defeat for Polly was inevitable.

Polly pursed up her mouth crossly. “Do, Thurley, this is my party,” she insisted, after which Thurley gave way and let Polly spend two precious dimes in lordly fashion.

As they proceeded down the Avenue, seated on the top of a Washington Square ’bus and quite as happy as when Ernestine had taken them out in her motor, Polly said,

“I haven’t had the chance of really doing anything for you, Thurley—”

“You have, too; there was Sam Sparling—”

“Yes, but no one is like Collin.” Her face was illumined from within. Thurley’s dramatic sense caught the wonderful hopelessness of the expression, cold-bloodedly resolving to copy it in any rÔle which should demand a similar emotion. “Collin is the most wonderful person in the world, besides being the most wonderful painter. I’m so glad he asked us out for Sunday. He’d have done so before but he’s terrifically busy. All the world crowds his doorstep to be painted. Fancy, Collin has no New York studio—if people wish his work they must come to him and come they do. When you see Parva Sed Apta, you’ll understand why it is the only place in the world of its kind and how beautiful and good is Collin’s own self.” Polly was unconscious of her betrayal.

“Is he as wonderful as Bliss Hobart? Ernestine says Collin painted Mr. Hobart’s portrait and it made him.”

Polly was loath to give up her argument. “Well, Bliss is wonderful—no one denies that—but in a different way. There are so many sides to Bliss; one day he is a hermit, the next a schoolboy, then a stern master, a diplomat, a sarcastic critic, a taskmaster—sometimes, very rarely of late, he is a dreamer, as idealistic as the tints of the skies in Collin’s pictures. But Collin is always Collin, a child with a talent so huge he does not comprehend it himself and, therefore, he can never be spoiled.”

“Has he never married?” Thurley asked innocently.

“Oh, no,” Polly’s answer was made in breathless haste, “he never thinks of such a thing—he is absorbed in work ... why, if one is his friend, it is all one should expect ... it is enough,” she added bravely.

“Do you think Caleb Patmore will marry?” Thurley braced her little boots against the front board of the ’bus as they rounded a bump in the pavement.

“Not unless some one makes Ernestine realize she has a heart tucked away in that austere bosom of hers.... I could beat Ernestine for not loving that boy,” and the thought of Polly, so tiny and gentle in her brown garb, and of Ernestine, stately and unapproachable, in some smoky drapery, made Thurley give way to a chuckle.

“Don’t try it unless you take a course of jiu-jitsu,” she advised.

But Polly was rambling on in a new vein. “When Ernestine returns, she will take you to Caleb’s house; then you’ll see how a famous novelist who has commercialized himself lives—and you won’t like it! Every June Ernestine visits Caleb and generally takes me as ballast—sort of grand duchess conferring a favor, you know. The rest of the year, unless Caleb entertains, he has to come to her whenever she will have him, starved of heart, yet loyal. (Of course if people care they do stay loyal) ... but wait until you see Caleb’s sleek establishment and contrast it with Collin’s transplanted paradise.”

They jumped off the ’bus steps and made their way down a narrow side street which was most distressingly dirty to Thurley’s mind, reaching a dilapidated brownstone-front house with “Rooms for Rent” in the parlor windows. Skipping up a fire escape on the outside, with Thurley toiling after, Polly opened a bit of a window on the top floor, jumped down inside while the boards creaked perilously and then assisted Thurley to do likewise.

“I never go up the inside way unless it is winter,” she explained, “because every poor devil would stop to ask for a loan. I can’t refuse unless I’m stony broke and I can’t afford to part with the little I have. Of course they can’t pay back, poor dears! So the fire escape affords an excellent subterfuge and no one’s feelings are hurt. I want to take Collin a book on woodcuts; I found it at an old bookstore the other day.” She was prowling about a dusty secretary, opening drawers and failing to close them.

Thurley stood in the center of the room aghast at Polly’s attic. Ernestine and Caleb had prepared her for it, saying with almost reproach that she, Thurley, was missing the glorious camaraderie with failures, she was the proverbial jewel in the rough who was taken to an expert lapidary, cut, polished and placed in platinum without any transitional stage! And she would do well to learn more of Polly’s life so as to glean the atmosphere of optimistic struggle, humorous cares and sometimes indescribable pathos. So much Thurley did in the moment she waited for Polly to find the book—a book costing a week’s earnings!

The room was badly in need of repair; the roof sloped down so Thurley had to crouch if she moved but a foot either way—it reminded her of Betsey Pilrig’s attic. There was a cot made into a divan with a turkey red covering and pillows, a scrap of a rag rug, an easel, for Polly did commercial drawings fairly well, a table one confusion of doll furniture and china dolls dressed in wisps of silk, satin and burlap. Polly explained this was her “tryout”—when she was planning scenes in her opera, she had the puppets assume positions so as to gauge the effect. She was so serious about the matter that Thurley was forced to conceal a laugh as she said the idea was excellent.

“I have no typewriter; did have last winter, but I played in hard luck and left it at ‘uncle’s.’—I scribble almost as swiftly and so it’s of no consequence,” she added contentedly. “Just last week I had an idea and I think it is a real idea, Thurley—as you are to sing the title rÔle I’ll tell it to you. Instead of having THE American opera founded on the landing of Columbus and a romance of an Indian girl with one of his knights and so on—of course I’ll finish it and have it produced later,” she supplemented in all seriousness—“I have decided to do a series of operas dealing with American wars. First, the Revolution—you are to be Moll Pitcher—then 1812—then the Mexican War—the Civil War—the Spanish-American—pray heaven there will be no other. Don’t you see how great it will be—great—great?” her body swaying with excitement. “Yesterday, I did two arias.” She fumbled about the secretary and unearthed music paper covered with startling black notes. “Oh, Thurley, I must succeed—I must. I won’t take no from either gods or half-gods. I’ll defy them! I won’t slink away and become an upstate saleswoman for victrolas! There!”

“I hope you will,” Thurley said gently.

“You say that as if you’d like to add, ‘Here, my pore gel, take this quarter and wear a cap the next time you meet me!’ Wait—wait until you fail.”

Thurley’s spirit was roused. “But I won’t—not in my work.”

“There are other ways than work—love, for instance?”

“I won’t fail in love,” the defiant, wild-rose Thurley was always on hand to meet a challenge.

“Don’t promise yourself everything,” was Polly’s sage advice, “and now, I believe we are ready to decamp.”