During the winter Thurley tired of the hysterical hikers, since they increased in number. They did not bother with such persons as Lissa or Mark or Polly. And Hobart, who was acknowledged to be the personification of public opinion, was immune from the pest. By degrees Thurley realized why Lissa was not bothered—because Lissa herself was a hysterical hiker developed to the stage of a near-genius; such transformations are too often wrought these days. Like recognizing like, she was severely let alone. As for Mark—when Thurley thought of him she found herself sitting down in a nearby chair, deaf to the world about her. There was no denying that if Lissa’s theories regarding artists’ privileges were true and her theories of life ethical, her exponent of them, Mark, was a sorry example. Mark was rapidly becoming a selfish neurasthenic; his better self died hard, it is true, but dying it was. Although the actress part of Thurley delighted in the unwise excitement of a flirtation with some one else’s property, the real Thurley looked askance at the changes being swiftly wrought in the boy, his over-emphasis on petty detail concerning his comfort, his ill humor at minor happenings which were not as he had wished, his sluggishness regarding work—the critics began to hint he was too bulky of figure. More and more did he bask in Lissa’s salon, drink and eat unwisely, taking her raggings about the “so-great-nobody” with humorous unconcern, quite positive of his own power to fascinate and offset Lissa’s tempers.

Foppish dress, lack of humdrum duties, home ties—there had been an aunt, Thurley learned, who had raised him and of whom he was now ashamed. She lived meekly retired in the little white house in Connecticut and Mark sent her money, the easiest thing in the world to send, and her name was never mentioned. His press agent had a most fetching story about his mother’s being a Turkish girl who escaped from a harem and his father a Grecian nobleman and Mark’s having been educated in Moscow and Berlin, whereas, in the real heart of the man, there was the spirit which could be reverent and proud of his aunt’s toil-worn hands with prominent purplish veins and knotted fingers, of the simple white house and the everyday living which had given him the constitution to endure the not-everyday living he now embraced.

When Thurley’s press agent had woven similar romances concerning herself, she refused to let them appear, saying with a simplicity worthy of an older, wiser woman, “I am Thurley Precore, an American. You may tell of the box-car wagon and those funny things of my childhood and my decision not to marry but have a career, but please do not tell what is an untruth,” at which the press agent had elaborated these details until they were scarcely to be recognized and printed the story surrounded by a string of heartbroken and despairing bachelors of every type who were wailing that life meant nothing as long as this new diva had chosen a career instead of love.

One March afternoon, after Thurley had created a new furore as Senta in “The Flying Dutchman,” her social engagements crowding her with a vengeance, three things occurred the same muggy, windy day which impressed themselves mightily on her mind.

She had had Mark in for tea, clandestinely, since Lissa was giving a musical and had invited both of them. Miss Clergy had gone for her usual drive and Thurley had donned corn-colored silk with silver trimmings and a new set of cameo jewelry to exercise her powers of fascination.

Ernestine was on tour and Polly Harris had temporarily disappeared from the horizon, particularly Thurley’s, because the latter had innocently had the bad taste to try to help her openly. Collin was in Washington to paint the president’s portrait and Caleb in Europe rapidly burning up the earnings of his last year’s book.

The opera season was near completion and Thurley and Miss Clergy were casting about where to spend the summer, the press agents urging some unusual spot which should furnish them with autumn copy—a submarine boat or the Sahara desert! The naming of a cigar for her and an invitation to sing at the dedication of a great church had been the events of the week while banners up and down Fifth Avenue announced that she had made a record of her “AÏda” aria, “O, ciel assuerri” for a prominent talking machine company. As the loveliest and youngest singer of her day, with Europe flirting with her managers to hear her and America plying her with dollars to keep her at home, Thurley wondered how it would seem to have some new pink-and-white-cheeked girl with an even greater voice than hers, bluer eyes and brighter hair, come slipping into the opera field as she had done. She wondered if she could be half as gracious as these tired-faced men and women who welcomed and hated and pitied her all in one!

She glanced sideways in a glass and added mentally, “You’ve a long road ahead, anyway,” while Mark droned on in impossible platitudes.

A maid brought a card and Thurley read the name, Hortense Quinby. Underneath was written, “Please see me, very vital.”

“Run along, Mark,” she commanded. “You’ve told pretty fibs long enough. Do go to Lissa’s recital. You must stop travelling on such thin ice as long as you are determined to be a slug.”

“That’s no fair.” Mark tried to take her hands but she drew away.

“How do you like these cameos?” she demanded.

“Let me get you lovelier things. There ought to be jewels just for you and no one else—a Thurley design in pale gold—”

“Spare me! There is a front-laced Precore corset, a Thurley ginger-ale and a Thurley Precore perfecto cigar, as well as a Thurley perfume and vanishing cream—why torture me any further?”

“Because I like you. I don’t know why I don’t say love you,” his handsome face flushing, “but you’re not the sort to say that to unless a chap has earned the right. How a pair of eyes can change everything one has made up his mind to say!”

“I’ll cover them with my hands,” she teased.

“No, they’d shine through at me—true blue always does. So I’ll just say like—and make you admit you return the sentiment. If it’s only liking each other, Thurley, there’s no harm!”

“I like you, but I don’t approve of you,” she admitted, “and I’d rather you didn’t come to see me when you ought to be with Lissa.”

“If she had some one she liked better than me, she would not remember such a word as loyalty,” he began impulsively.

“No fair—run along and do take some exercises. You look aldermanic.”

Reluctantly, he rose. “Why see every stray female from nowhere? I used to when I took life and art seriously. It grew to be a bore and I never see any one now. Even if the Jap does steal more than his wages, I keep him because he knows how never to open the door for any one but the laundry and the liquor agents.”

“I see them because it is a novelty, as people see me because I am one,” she said soberly. “Some day the people and I will stop both customs.... Good-by, Mark—my apologies to Lissa and I shall see her soon.”

Hortense Quinby proved to be a “hysterical hiker”—one concluded that from her pale, rather quick face and over-severe mode of hair-dressing. She had an untrimmed floppy hat, a bright green walking suit that had seen better days and a severe, gentlemanly cravat throttling her chin. There was an attempt to have a professional air by carrying a leather portfolio, but one could not have told whether she was a travelling manicure or secretary to a professor on Egyptology!

She was not a young woman nor was she middle-aged; perhaps the look of discontent in her dark eyes shadowed her really admirable features. She lost no time in making her wants known; one could see that she had been met with many rebuffs in similar situations and so, like the door to door canvasser she had learned to say the most in the least time!

“Miss Precore,” she began in her tense voice, artificially accented here and there with a dash of pseudo-New York, “I am Hortense Quinby, I live in Greenwich Village, and perhaps I should say I starve in Greenwich Village. I have watched your rise into fame, not with envy but with admiration and respect. You are young, beautiful, talented; you have the world in the palm of your little hand. I do not ask you to be anything unreasonable—but I do implore your help. Let me become essential to you in some capacity—a secretary, a housekeeper, a maid—I hold myself above no office if it concerns the right person. I play accompaniments fairly well—not as well as you would wish for public appearances but for your practice-hour. I am one of those who have failed,” here a deep-seated sigh. “I came from a small town in the middle part of the state about ten years ago; every one thought I had great literary ability as well as musical. But there was no one to help me get across—perhaps when one’s talents are divided one is to be pitied.”

She said all this, scarcely pausing. Now she stopped to breathe.

“Really, Miss Quinby, I have every one I need,” Thurley said gently.

“But I have not,” returned Miss Quinby to her amazement. “Be generous, lovely young thing, be generous to us who have failed. I am not asking for fame—merely to become associated with it.” She held out her hands dramatically. “Do not send me back to be ground down again!”

“I don’t need you,” Thurley protested, most perturbed.

“I need you. My life cannot be lived as are thousands of women’s lives, bounded by the price of calico and two weeks’ vacation in a lake cottage. I have a soul above pots and pans—a fearless soul, capable of enduring all things to achieve my aim. Let me be your inspiration—you think I could not?” The restless eyes were dangerous and somewhat vindictive.

Miss Quinby proceeded to enumerate her abilities and the capacities in which she had served. As nearly as Thurley could understand a comic opera singer stranded in Miss Quinby’s home town had heard her sing and idly encouraged the girl. Some one financed the comic opera singer on to New York and she thought no more of the incident. Not so with Hortense Quinby. From the moment she had been told she had “a voice” and a “future” and “get out of this hole, my dear”—everything in her present scheme of things had been abandoned. She came to New York only to find the opera singer absorbed in her own difficulties and to battle alone with her “voice” and her “future” and her having left “the dreadful hole.”

She had tried magazine work; rejection slips enough to have papered the boarding house were the result. She had, sadly enough, a glimmer of the divine spark which led her on a madcap chase during which the best years of girlhood were wasted. She became socialist and follower of long-haired, East Side gentlemen’s magazines which the authorities usually made a bonfire of, locking up the long-haired gentlemen. She was prominent in visiting them in the Tombs and giving out dangerous statements to the press, in hopes, really, of being locked up herself and thus appearing as a martyr. There are so many would-be martyrs, self-inflicted benefactors of the public. But it is sometimes as hard work to gain persecution and as futile as the task of the men who are paid seven dollars a day to trace the history of seven cents. So Hortense Quinby had found it. No one listened to her nor locked her up and admitted sob sisters to write down her ravings in the good old-fashioned dot-and-asterisk style. But, great Beatrice Fairfax, this was not all wherein she had suffered! Thurley was, by turns, amused, bored, thoughtful and finally mentally depressed as the recital of the past flowed on in reels.

She had started a paper herself, only to have it fail in a dismal way. There was not enough of danger in it to have the postal authorities take the matter up. She had lived among the East Side fanatics, had been second housemaid in a rich New Yorker’s family, hoping to observe the scandals of the leisure class and publish them later on. Evidently, she had been unable to divulge glorious scandals, she had a cast off hat of one of the daughters of the family, a decent sort of room and better food than Greenwich Village had offered and the third day she was kindly dismissed for general lack of qualifications. She had tried playing accompaniments, had done china painting, suped in Broadway comedies, had done everything that a woman troubled by a “liberated soul” could do and yet she had not made herself invaluable to any one really worth the while. She wanted to attach herself to Thurley, a sort of figurative third-rail affair, the inspiration and strength of Thurley’s youthful self.

Thurley, bewildered from the outpouring and wishing some one would come and spirit her away, weakly said she could come in to take some dictation for correspondence once a week or do other minor tasks.

“Until I prove myself essential,” insisted Miss Quinby. “When that day comes—”

At which Thurley named a day and hour and wearily rang the bell to have her shown out.

Hortense Quinby’s visit left her with a headache and no zest for her supper. The opera that night was to be “The Magic Flute,” and Thurley was at her best as Pamina. She loved the rÔle and rehearsals had proceeded in excellent fashion. But the interview with Hortense had given her a fearful sense as to her own future. Would she, in turn, become furtive, restless, eager to seize upon some other new and lovely creature, with a sort of vampirish desire to have youth by feeding on youth?

She went to her room without ringing for her maid and slipped out of her brilliant afternoon frock. She rummaged in her clothes room crowded with new gorgeousness until she found a rough tweed suit and a boyish hat. Taking a swagger stick and whistling for Taffy, she wilfully disappeared out of the apartment at just the hour her schedule called for rest, facial massage and toasted wafers with hot milk!

It was rainy, and the air was unnaturally warm, the wind having died down. Her throat doctor would have come after her in an ambulance had he known she was sauntering along the river drive, pausing to look at the blinking lights on the boats or at the dark, beautiful uncertainty of what lay on the other shore.

Was she beginning to have nerves? Thurley spoke sharply to Tally, warning him to heel her or she would disown him. Nerves! She who had never in her life been prey to so much as a headache, who had laughed at throat washes and precaution against eye strain, who audaciously cracked nuts with her firm, white teeth and declared she did not know how it would feel to be even a trifle indisposed!

Not the strain of training nor the dÉbut, the unnatural life of the opera stage nor the atmosphere of crowds and tired, jaded artists who knew, too well, how it felt to be muchly indisposed had made such inroads on her Viking-like constitution as this queer woman who bounded in on her coquettish serenity and fairly startled a yes out of her. Thurley felt trip-hammer pulses beating in her forehead. She wanted to wander on and on until the dark became permanent and the traffic scarce and she was dog-tired as she used to be when she was at the end of one of her tramps with Dan and they sat under a tree to get rested up, kissing each other a shocking number of times ... strange this woman should so affect her.

She began thinking in irregular fashion, indicative of her tired brain, of the different persons with whom the new life had brought close and necessary contact ... Madame Coleno, the great Wagnerian contralto, strong and fine by birthright but with the ungovernable temper which caused her to turn on little Edith Hooker, the English girl who was her lyric soprano, slapping her face and tearing at her hair until some one interfered. She wondered if the madhouse would be this famous woman’s last abode. Some said she had run amuck through drink, others heartbreak, a few whispered insanity was in the family. Then there was Escola, the silver-throated tenor! She shook her tired head in disapproval. Escola, who was a merciless tyrant, cared for by his wife as if he were an infant in arms and who rewarded her with a new breach of promise suit as a payment! The patient wife, an Italian peasant as every one knew, made no protest, but continued her round of preparing mustard footbaths and making native dishes Escola demanded, lighting her candles before her little shrine for her master’s success!

... Now it was Dan Ruffio, the bass—what an outcast from society in Birge’s Corners he would be, openly defiant of conventions, always storming and blustering about, sneering at him or her who obeyed the law, ridiculing, fond of cruel practical joking of a low calibre, loving no one save himself, yet appearing on the stage as the most tender of lovers, the gentlest of patriarchs! And when Thurley attended the first supper party given by a famous ballet dancer, she had been genuinely and lastingly shocked at not only the conversation but the manners observed by all,—it was not the gluttony of Lissa’s parties that had been in evidence but an almost sinister fashion of wasting food and demanding bizarre, unhealthful dishes.

Nor could she forget Wimple O’Horo, who had made violent love to her and pouted when repulsed! What a wishy-washy, unreal boor he was when one knew him from behind the footlights, what a dashing, light hearted cavalier he appeared when viewed on the other side! Thurley’s lips curved in scorn as she recalled his favorite pastime of reading aloud mash notes and the signed names as well. Some said that he conducted a highbrow form of blackmail when he needed extra money with which to gamble.

There had been a director’s party where throwing egg-nogs had been the chief sport, regardless of costumes; a hundred and one such incidents and new, distressing personalities kept recurring to Thurley as she stood there, quite sure she was tired of it all, of even her own deliciously decent and attractive way of spending her first earned dollars and making the most of blue eyes, curving scarlet lips and bright brown hair.

She remembered what Polly had told her regarding her future progress.

“There are three steps of becoming truly mundane. First, you buy things in a store. Next, you purchase articles in a shop. Lastly, you acquire treasures in an establishment!”

With a sense of disappointment at having nothing which she might anticipate, Thurley realized she had reached the last stage. Only yesterday she had “acquired” a tapestry treasure from a haughty “establishment,” the proprietor bowing her in and out with formal regard!

She leaned over a stone parapet, gazing at the fog, the occasional rain drops making her cheeks cool and refreshed, although Taffy crouched unwillingly beside her and wondered why this adorable but unreasonable mistress of his walked through mud when her car waited for her signal, to say nothing of his own self being hideously bespotted and, therefore, in line for odious bathing.

Some one jostled near her, looked at her sharply for a moment and then said in an alarmed tone,

“My dear little girl, what a risk on such a night! Not an hour before you’re due in your dressing-room—tell me, what is it?”

It was Bliss Hobart in an equally grotesque get-up, a checkered raincoat and hat winning him the title of Mackintosh of Mackintosh.

Thurley turned and held out her hands, the swagger stick falling with an unjust thump on Taffy’s long-suffering back.

“I’m so glad—I’m lonesome and queer. I need to be set right,” she protested so wistfully that Hobart kept holding on to her hands, the darkness keeping her from spying how tender an expression was in his eyes.

“What’s it all about? I’ve just run out of secrets, so do tell me. Let’s walk on, not stand in this damp. Let me see your boots—are they stout enough? Stand under this lamplight until I disprove your fib—ah-ha, they are not stout enough. I shall call a cab.”

“Please don’t. I’ll run away and you’ll have to drive Taffy about. I must walk or I cannot sing to-night—I want to walk miles and miles—”

“They’ll miss you and be throwing a scare into Gasoti that you’ve been kidnapped. It’s ‘The Magic Flute,’ too, one of your best ... please, Thurley, just walk along until you’ve told me the worst and then we’ll get a cab—”

“What of yourself?” she asked, suddenly feeling elated and quite fit.

He halfway unbuttoned his coat, showing an expanse of white shirt bosom. “Full dress for a banquet at which I’m to speak. I took a turn along here to get myself in trim ... tell me, what about your fancies?”

Thurley’s eyes were like stars. She caught hold of his arm as if he had been Dan and began to talk. It seemed the most wonderful yet natural thing in the world to tell him everything. The harsh critic, the impersonal man of affairs vanished; he was a good pal walking unselfishly in the rain and under such self-sacrificing conditions that it would be an unusual woman who could not furnish him with a complete line of new secrets!

When she finished, having begun with Mark’s flirtation and her own hint of nerves and ending with this Hortense Quinby and the muddle she was in about the morals of the “songbirds,” Hobart said with a jolly laugh that set her nerves quite right,

“When you get jammed, always remember the most delectable sport in the world is to let fools take you for an even greater fool. As I told you many months ago, be yourself and everything swings into line. Come over to-morrow at ten; there are one or two flaws in your ‘Rigoletto’ song, ‘Caro Nome’—didn’t know I kept such close track of some one, did you?... Hi, cabby—yes, no, just the lady and the terrier, the Terror will proceed alone, but twice as happy because he paused before a certain dark outline ... good-by, to-morrow at ten and, remember, stouter boots the next time it rains.”

With a feeling of disappointment that he did not join her, yet exhilarated and impatient for the morning, Thurley leaned back in the cab and hugged the aggrieved Taffy.

She sang so well that night the critics bemoaned the lack of new adjectives with which to do her credit, her dressing-room was crowded with visitors, social leaders who had left their boxes to besiege her with invitations. Miss Clergy sat supreme in a corner of the dressing-room, engrossed in old-style crewel work which she had learned as a girl.

“And no man will ever break your heart,” she said in fond delusion.

Thurley vanished. During the entire opera she had thought of the fact that Bliss Hobart really worried because she had not worn stouter boots ... it was so “comfy” to know some one worried about such things. If only the men who thought ahead about all the little things for a woman were not so universally inclined to forbid a woman’s thinking ahead about the big ones....