When a young man suddenly goes mad in a cab, grapples the young woman who has intrusted herself to his protection, pins her arms to her sides, squeezes her torso till her bones crunch and she has no breath to squawk with, then kisses her deaf and dumb and blind, it is still a nice question which of the two is the helpless one and which has overpowered the other.

Appearances are never more deceitful than in such attacks, and while eye-witnesses are infrequent, they are also untrustworthy. They cannot even tell which of the two is victim of the outrage. The motionless gazelle in the folds of the constrictor may be in full control of the situation.

It undoubtedly has happened, oftener than it should have, in the history of the world that young men have made these onsets without just provocation and have been properly slapped, horsewhipped, or shot for their unwelcome violence. It has also happened that young men have failed to make these onsets when they would have been welcome.

But the perfection of the womanly art of self-pretense is when she subtly wills the young man to overpower her and is so carried away by her own success that she forgets who started it. She droops, swoons, shivers before the fury of her own inspiration, and cries out, with absolute sincerity: “How dare you! How could you! What made you!” or simply moans, “Why, Oswald!” and resists invitingly.

Kedzie had been hoping and praying that Jim Dyckman would kiss her, and mutely daring him to. Yet when he obeyed her tacit behest and asked her permission she was too frightened to refuse. He was stronger than she expected, and he held her longer. When at last she came out for air she was shattered with a pleasant horror.

She barely had the strength to gasp, “Why, Mr. Dyckman, aren't you awful?” and time to straighten her jumbled hat and hair when her apartment-building drew up alongside the limousine and came to a halt.

Dyckman pleaded, like a half-witted booby, “Let's take a little longer ride.”

But she remembered her dignity and said, with imperial scorn, “I should hope not!”

She permitted him to help her out.

He said: “When may I see you again? Soon, please!”

She smiled, with a hurt patience, and answered, “Not for a long while.”

He chuckled: “To-morrow, eh? That's great!”

She wished that he would not say, “That's great.” If he would only say, “Ripping!” or, “I say, that's ripping!” or, “Awfully good of you,” or, “No end”—anything swagger. But he would not swagger.

He escorted her to the elevator, where she gave him a queenly hand and murmured, “Good night!”

He watched her go up like Medea in machina; then he turned away and stumbled back into his limousine. It was still fragrant from her presence. The perfume she was using then was a rather aggressive essence of a lingering tenacity upon the atmosphere. But Dyckman was so excited that he liked it. The limousine could hardly contain him.

Kedzie felicitated herself on escaping from his thrall just in time to avoid being stupefied by it. She thanked Heaven that she had not flung her arms around him and claimed him for her own. She had the cleverness of elusion that her sex displays in all the species, from Cleopatras to clams, from butterflies to rhinoceroses. How wisely they practise to evade what they demand, leaving the stupid male to ponder the mysteries of womankind!

When Kedzie reached her mirror she told the approving person she found there that she was doing pretty well for a poor young girl not long in from the country. She postured joyously as she undressed, and danced a feminine war-dance in much the same costume that she wore when Jim Dyckman fished her out of the pool at Newport. She sang:

She had slapped her rescuer's hands away then and groaned to learn that she had driven off a famous plutocrat. But now he was back; indeed he was in the pool now, and she had him on her hook. He had grievously disappointed her by turning out to be a commonplace young man with no gilt on his phrases. But one must be merciful to a million dollars.

The next morning she dreamed of him as a suitor presenting her with a bag of gold instead of a bouquet. Just as she reached for it the telephone rang and a hall-boyish voice told her that it was seven o'clock.

This was the midnight alarm to Cinderella, and she became again a poor working-girl. She had to abandon her prince and run from the palace of dreams to the studio of toil.

She was a trifle surly when she confronted Ferriday. He studied her, smilingly queerly and overplaying indifference:

“Have a nice dinner last night?”

Kedzie fixed him with a skewery glare: “What's your little game? Why did you turn up missing?”

“I had another engagement. Didn't you get my note?”

“Ah, behave, behave!” said Kedzie, then blushed at the plebeian phrase. She was beginning to have a quickly remorseful ear. As soon as she should learn to hear her first thoughts first, and suppress them unspoken, she would be a made lady.

“Oh, you're a true artist, Anita,” said Ferriday. “Nothing can hinder your flight into the empyrean.”

“Don't sing it. Explain it,” Kedzie sneered.

Ferriday laughed so delightedly that he must embrace her. She shoved him back and brushed the imaginary dust of his contact from the shoulders that had but lately been compressed by a million dollars.

“I see you landed him,” said Ferriday.

“And I see that all your talk about loving me so much was just a fake,” said Kedzie.

“Why do you say that? I adore you.”

“If you did, would you throw me at the head of another fellow?” asked Kedzie.

“If it was for the advancement of your career, yes,” Ferriday insisted.

“What's Mr. Dyckman got to do with my career?”

“He can make it, if he doesn't break it.”

“Come again.”

“If you fall in love with that big thug, or if you play him for a limousine like a chorus-girl on the make, your career is gone. But if you use him for your future—well, I have a little scheme that might bounce you up to the sky in a hurry. You could have your millionaire and your fame as well.”

“What's the little scheme, Ferri darling?”

“I'll tell you later. We've got to go to the projection-room and see your new film run off. It's assembled, cut, subtitled, ready for the market. Come along.”

Kedzie went along and sat in the dark room watching the reel go by. Her other selves came forth in troops to reveal themselves: Kedzie the poor little shy girl, for she was that at times; Kedzie the petulant, the revengeful, the forgiving; Kedzie on her knees in prayer—she prayed at times, as everybody does, the most villainous no less ardently than the most blameless; Kedzie dancing; Kedzie flirting, in love, tempted, tipsy; Kedzie seduced, deserted, forgiven, converted, happily married; Kedzie a mother with a little hired baby at her little breast. There was even a picture of her in a vision as a sweet old lady with snowy hair about her face, and she was surrounded by grown men who were her sons, and young mothers who were her daughters. The unending magic of the moving pictures had enabled her to see herself as others saw her, and as she saw herself, and as nobody should ever see her.

Kedzie doted on the picture of herself as a dear old lady leaning on her old husband among their children. She shed tears over that delightful, most unusual, privilege of witnessing herself peacefully, blessedly ancient.

Whether she ever reached old age and had a husband living then and children grown is beyond the knowledge of this chronicle or its prophecy, for this book goes only so far as 1917. But just for a venture, assuming Kedzie to be about twenty in 1916, that would make Kedzie born four years back in the last century. Now, adding sixty to 1896 brings one to 1956; and what the world will be like then—and who'll be in it or what they may be doing, how dressing, if at all, what riding in, fighting about, agreeing upon—it were folly to guess at.

It is safe to say only that people will then be very much at heart what they are to-day and were in the days when the Assyrian women and men felt as we do about most things. Kedzie will be scolding her children or her grandchildren and telling them that in her day little girls did not speak disrespectfully to their parents or run away from them or do immodest, forward things.

That much is certain to be true, as it has always been. The critics of then will be saying that there are no great novelists in 1956 such as there were in 1916, when giants wrote, but not for money or for cheap sensations. They will laud the Wilsonian era when America not only knew a millennium of golden fiction, poetry, drama, humor, sculpture, painting, architecture, and engineering, but revealed its greatness in moving-picture classics, in a lofty conception of the dance as an eloquence; when the nation acted as a sister of charity to bleeding Europe, pouring eleemosynary millions from the cornucopia stretched across the sea, and finally entered the war with reluctant majesty and unexampled might, her citizens unanimously patriotic. Ye gods! even the politicians will be statesmen and their debates classics.

Critics of then will be regretting that American fiction, poetry, drama, art, and journalism are so inferior to foreign work, and foreign critics will admit it and tell them why. Some military writers will be pointing out that war is no longer possible, and others will be crying out that it is inevitable and America unprepared.

Doctors will be complaining that modern restlessness is creating new nervous diseases, as doctors did in 1916 A.D., B.C., and B.A. (which is, Before Adam). Doctors will complain that modern mothers do not nurse their own babies—which has always been both true and untrue—and that women do not wear enough clothes for health, not to mention modesty.

In fact, Kedzie, if she lives, will find the spirit of the world almost altogether what grandmothers have always found it. But Kedzie must be left to find this out for herself.

When, then, Kedzie saw how beautifully she photographed and how well she looked as an old lady, she wept rapturously and sighed, “I'll never give up the pictures.”

Ferriday sighed, too, for that meant to his knowing soul that she was not long for this movie world. But he did not tell her so. He told her:

“You're as wise as you are beautiful. You'll be as famous as you'll be rich. And this Dyckman lad can hurry things up.”

“How?” asked Kedzie, already foreseeing his game.

“The backers of the Hyperfilm Company are getting writer's cramp in the spending hand. They call it conservatism, but it's really cowardice. The moving-picture business has gone from the Golconda to the gambling stage. A few years ago nearly anybody could get rich in a minute. A lot of cheap photographers and street-car conductors were caught in a cloudburst of money and thought they made it. They treated money like rain, and the wastefulness in this trade has been rivaled by nothing recent except the European war. Some of the biggest studios are dark; some of the leaders of yesterday are so bankrupt that their banks don't dare let 'em drop for fear they'll bust and blow up the whole business. Most of the actors are not getting half what they're advertised to get, but they're getting four times what they ought to get.

“There are a few men and women who are earning even more than they are getting, and that's a million a minute. Now, the one chance for you, Anita, is to have some tremendous personal backing. You've come into the game a little late. This firm you're with is tottering. They blame me for it, but it's not my fault altogether. Anyway, this company is riding for a fall, and down we may all go in the dust with a dozen other big companies, any day.”

Kedzie's heart stopped. In the dark she clutched Ferriday's arm so tightly that he ouched. To have her career smashed at its beginning would be just her luck. It grew suddenly more dear than ever, because it was imperiled. The thought of having her pictures fail of their mission throughout the world was as hideous as was the knowledge to Carlyle that the only manuscript of his history was but a shovelful of ashes.

Ferriday put his arm about her, and she crept in under his chin for safety. She felt very cozy to him, there, and he rejoiced that he had her his at last. Then as before he saw that he was no more to her than an umbrella or an awning in a shower. He wanted to fling her away; but she was still to him an invention to patent and promote. So he told her:

“If you can persuade this Dyckman to boost your career, get behind you with a bunch of kale and whoop up the publicity, we can stampede the public, and the little theater managers will mob the exchanges for reels of you. It's only a question of money, Anita. Talk about the Archimedean lever! Give me the crowbar of advertising, and I'll set the earth rolling the other way round so the sun will rise in the west and print no other pictures but yours.

“There isn't room for everybody in the movie business any more. There's room only for the people who wear lightning-rods and stand on solid gold pedestals that won't wash away. Go after your young millionaire, Anita, and put his money to work.”

Kedzie pondered. She brought to bear on the problem all the strategic intuition of her sex. She saw the importance of getting Dyckman's money into circulation. She was afraid it might not be easy.

Kedzie sighed: “It's a little early for me to ask a gentleman I've only met a couple o' times to kindly pass the millions. He must have met a lot of women by now who've held out their hands to him and said, 'Please,' and not got anything but the cold boiled eye. I don't know much about millionaires, but I have a feeling that if they started giving the money out to every girl they met, they'd last just about as long as a real bargain does in Macy's. The women would trample them to death and tear one another to pieces.”

“But Dyckman's crazy about you, Anita. I could see it in his eyes. He's plumb daffy.”

“Maybe so and maybe not. Maybe he's that way with every girl under forty. I've never seen him work, but I've seen him in the midst of that Newport bunch and they've got me lashed to the mast for clothes, looks, language, and everything.”

“You're a novelty to him, Anita. He's tired of those blasÉes creatures.”

“They didn't look very blah-zay to me. They seemed to be up and doing every minute. But supposing he was crazy about me, if I said to him, 'You can have two kisses for a million dollars apiece?' can you see him begin to holler: 'Where am I? Please take me home!'”

Ferriday sighed: “Perhaps you're right. It wouldn't do to give a mercenary look to your interest in him too soon. Let me talk to him.”

“What's your peculiar charm?”

“I'd put it up to him as a business proposition. I'd say, 'The moving-picture field is the greatest gold-field in the world.' I'd tell him how many hundred thousand theaters there are in the world, all of them eager for your pictures and only needing to be told about them. I'd tell him that for every dollar he put in he'd take out ten, in addition to furthering the artistic glory of the most beautiful genius on the dramatic horizon. I'd show him how he couldn't lose.”

“But you just said—”

“Oh, I know, but we can't put on the screen everything we say in the projection-room. And it is a fact that there is big money in the movies.”

“There must be,” said Kedzie, “if as much has been sunk in 'em as you say.”

“Yes, and it's all there for the right man to dig up if he only goes about it intelligently. Let me talk to him.”

Kedzie thought hard. Then she said: “No! Not yet! You'd only scare him away. I'll do my best to get him interested in me, and you do your best to get him interested in the business; and then when the time is just right we can talk turkey. But not now, Ferri, not yet.”

“You're as wise as you are beautiful,” said Ferriday, again. “I can't see your beauty, but your wisdom shines in the dark. We'll do great things together, Anita.”

His arm tightened around her, reminding her that she was still in his elbow. Before she was quite alive to his purpose his lips touched her cheek.

“Don't do that!” she snapped. “How dare you!”

He laughed: “I forgot. The price on your kisses has just skyrocketed to a million apiece. Don't forget my commission.”

She growled pettishly. He spoke more soberly:

“You need me yet, little lady. Don't quench my enthusiasms too roughly or I might take up some other pretty little girl as my medium of expression. There are lots and lots of pretties born every minute, but it takes years to make a director like me.”

And she knew that this was true.

“I was only fooling,” she said. “Don't be mad at me. You can kiss me if you want to.”

“I don't want to,” he said, as hurt as an overgrown boy or a prima donna.

The door opened, and a wave of light swept into the room. A voice followed it.

“Is Miss Adair in there?”

“Yes,” Kedzie answered, in confusion.

“Gent'man to see you.”

It was Jim Dyckman. He followed closely and entered the room just as Ferriday found the electric button and switched on the light.

Kedzie and Ferriday were both encouraged when they saw a look of jealous suspicion cross his face. Ferriday hastened to explain:

“We've been editing Miss Adair's new film. Like to see an advance edition of it?”

“Love to,” said Dyckman.

“Oh, Simpson, run that last picture through again,” Ferriday called through a little hole in the wall.

A faint “All right, sir” responded.

Kedzie led Dyckman to a chair and took the next one to it.

Ferriday beamed on them and switched on the dark. Then, as if by a divine miracle, the screen at the end of the room became a world of life and light. People were there, and places. Mountains were swung into view and removed. Palaces were decreed and annulled. Fields blossomed with flowers; ballrooms swirled; streets seethed.

Anita Adair was created luminous, seraphic, composed of light and emotion. She came so near and so large that her very thoughts seemed to be photographed. She drifted away; she smiled, danced, wept, and made her human appeal with angelic eloquence.

Dyckman groaned with the very affliction of her charm. She pleased him so fiercely that he swore about it. He cried out in the dark that she was the blank-blankest little witch in the world. Then he groveled in apology, as if his profanity had not been the ultimate gallantry.

When the picture was finished he turned to Kedzie and said, “My God, you're great!” He turned to Ferriday. “Isn't she, Mr.—Fenimore?”

“I think so,” said Ferriday; “and the world will think so soon.”

Kedzie shook her head. “I'm only a beginner. I don't know anything at all.”

“Why, you're a genius!” Dyckman exploded. “You're simply great. You know everything; you—”

Ferriday touched him on the arm. “We mustn't spoil her. There is a charm and meekness about her that we must not lose.”

Dyckman swallowed his other great's and after profound thought said, “Let's lunch somewhere.”

Ferriday excused himself, but said that the air would be good for Miss Adair. She was working too hard.

So she took the air.

Dyckman had come to the studio with Charity's business as an excuse. He had forgotten to give the excuse, and now he had forgotten the business. He did not know that he was now Kedzie Thropp's business. And she was minding her own business.