The next morning she resolved to go at once to Blainey, to fling herself heart and soul into her profession, to get an engagement in some stock company. She hesitated, and ended by putting it off till the next day. She said to herself that she must seek relief in flight, a new life, new friends for a month at least, until she should be stronger. She said it to herself each day, and each day she tarried. Perhaps she hoped for some sign of weakness on Massingale's part, an overture that would give her the confidence of a scornful rejection. But each day passed without word or sign from him. This firmness, this regained control, this one man who could steadfastly avoid her, obsessed her. She sought not to think of him—and his image intruded itself every day, at every moment. When the telephone rang its always mysterious call, she went to it with a tense arrestation of her nerves expectant of his voice, fearing—hoping. At the theater or the opera, in her first sweeping glance over the audience, it was always his face she sought. She sought it in the chances of the crowded streets, and with a restless glance searched among the carriages as she passed alone, or in gay company, up the avenue. She knew where he held court, following the calendar in the newspaper, and often she was tempted to steal in at the back of the dim, crowded court room, unobserved—just why, with what undefined hope, she did not know. This impulse she resisted but never confidently conquered. Each day she repeated that she must go; each day she tarried.

For two weeks she led a dulled and purposeless existence. She succeeded in crowding the day, in shutting out opportunity for thought, in consuming the night so as to return with enough fatigue to fall into heavy troubled slumber. The bright moments were those when she went with Snyder's little girl on brief excursions into the country, for a moment's forgetfulness among the woods, an hour of willing slavery to childish whims, throwing herself into foolish romping games that brought a comforting sense of the world's unrealities. The sensation that childish clinging brought her at times surprised her by its intensity. She had never thought of having children, and yet this child awoke strange yearnings. Troubled, she told herself that it was the weakness of her suffering intensified by loneliness, and satisfied herself with this reply.

Her days were curiously divided. She saw Harrigan Blood and Sassoon, but to their assiduous pursuit she flung only crumbs. She saw them in the tantalizing publicity of the down-stairs parlor—rarely, for an hour perhaps; but she steadfastly refused further concessions. Busby, clearly inspired, sought to entice her to many alluring entertainments, some conventional, others not quite so. She refused all. She avoided all parties where she might encounter the one man, avoiding too that entourage of his which she had so eagerly sought with a sense of right on the occasion of the luncheon to De Joncy.

Instead, she sought desperately to return to the light bantering existence she had formerly known. The glimpses she had had into the upper world frightened her. It laid before her crude vanities which she would have preferred to ignore; it started temptations where she had been conscious of none. In her present depression, an instinct bade her flee all that dazzled her; a voice whispered to her that, in the mad impulses of a groping despair, she might not always resist, or care to resist—that it were better not to know that luxury and power lay so easily at hand, ready on the feminine fingers of Sassoon or the imperious clutch of Harrigan Blood.

Nor was the temptation a fancied one, for the hunger that had awakened was an inner one. In her short glimpse of luxury she had become aware of new longings, material cravings, vanities of the flesh. Occasionally in the mornings, to escape from her moods, she went out for long walks past tempting shop-windows—those shop-windows of New York, more devastating than all the flesh hunters, on whose balances lie how many feminine souls! She would stop breathlessly, hypnotized, hanging on visions of gorgeous silks, imperial furs, opera-cloaks that might transform a peasant into a queen, jewels that danced before her eyes, fascinating them strangely with their serpentine coldness.

She could not prevent her lawless imagination from wandering, visualizing another DorÉ Baxter, who swept gorgeously among the costly women of the opera and the restaurants, compelling a startled attention, luxuriant, radiant, triumphant with the sinister blinking eyes of Sassoon always over her glowing shoulder. What constantly started this torturing image before her was that she had now no doubt as to what she could do with him. At first, incredulously, she could not believe that his interest would survive a week—that he would not depart furiously, once the scales had fallen from his hungry glance and he had realized that in her mocking society nothing was reserved for him but humiliation and deception. But, to her amazement, she found it was not so; that something had penetrated profoundly into that chilled soul, and that the passion which had been kindled was one that sweeps men on to irretrievable follies, unthinkable sacrifices, at the hands of a calm woman. Sassoon—no. But Sassoon and the lure of a thousand shop-windows spreading before her their soft enwrapping mysteries of splendor.... Occasionally, gazing entranced before some bewildering evening gown, a peignoir all lace and cloud, a rope of milky pearls, she felt this sensation so compellingly that she would retreat breathlessly, trembling from head to foot.

What made the temptation doubly insidious was her own awakened point of view. She saw now the immense difference in scale between the upper world and the semi-Bohemian state of the Salamanders. Their desperate struggle to make both ends meet, their prodigies of imaginative planning, their campaigns of economy, all to procure a few insignificant dollars— this struggle of wits which had once exhilarated her now depressed her fearfully. She had a sort of second sight; she saw now the approach of failure, the inexorable famine that lay beyond the short dominion of youth. She had always dimly perceived this danger, saying to herself that she could cast the die before another cast it for her. But now, thinking of her twenty-third year still six months away, she had a feeling as if she were being hurried toward her choice, frantically driven; and yet, she could not see where all this whirlwind force was carrying her.

At this moment her mentality began. She felt a new birth of her reason—that unquiet searching of the self so often child of grief. She began to question—to analyze and to strive to penetrate the future. She saw herself in others, the past and the possible future: Ida Summers, arriving like a skipping child, all heedless laughter, inconscient, holding out avid arms for flowers, and Winona, a figure with half averted face, hand upon the latch, ready to depart. No, she would not be like Winona; that was impossible, she said, with a shudder; Winona was but a figure standing as a warning!

Winona herself, occupied with rehearsals, went out of her day, momentarily. DorÉ took her to the opera on the Monday nights that Mr. Peavey had placed at her disposal. She never made the mistake of seeking a male escort. She felt always that Peavey's timid eyes were on her, hidden somewhere in that vast concourse, spying on her actions, waiting suspiciously to see if her companion were a man, a young and ardent man of her own generation. Nor was this entirely surmise. The second Monday, he had loomed at her side out of nowhere, happiness in his eyes, radiant to find her so discreetly accompanied. He had taken them to supper afterward. It seemed to her that Winona had put herself out to attract him—excessively so, considering her proprietorship; for the etiquette of Salamanders is imperious on such points. But then, Winona was in a curious mood, brooding, gay by starts and as suddenly silent. DorÉ sometimes wondered if things were working out well at the theater. In her determination to resist this life—Massingale's world, into which she had blundered so unluckily—she turned hungrily to the company of the other Salamanders, with a new need of woman's sympathy and understanding. Besides Winona and Ida, there were on the floor below Estelle Monks, whom she knew well and Clarice Stuart and Anita Morgan, roommates, whom she knew slightly, despite their repeated advances. They were trained nurses, lately arrived from the far West, older than the rest, but Salamanders by their craving for excitement and their fidelity to the rule of never allowing business to interfere with pleasure. DorÉ had always had that curiosity which each Salamander feels for another. How did they play their games? Had they methods which she had not divined? Above all, what was to be the end of the comedy? Readily welcomed, she drifted into their society for a week or so. They engaged themselves only for the day, and yet, despite the exacting strain they underwent (and, to her surprise, she soon discovered that they were passionately devoted to their profession), each night by half past seven they came tripping down the steps to where DorÉ, with the escorts, was waiting in an automobile to whirl them to the theater, to a long drive into the country, dinner and an impromptu dance, and then home by the midnight stars, ready to rise with the dawn and begin the day's toil. They seemed made of iron.

They had their stories to tell, their analyses of men and life. Doctors, it seemed, were sometimes human, especially old ones. Often they had in the party men whose names were famous in the profession, abrupt incisive tyrants, neither abrupt nor tyrannical with them, submitting to their banter, prodigal of compliments, just as difficult to be kept in place as other men. DorÉ listened in astonishment to their conversations, amazed at the impertinence of the girls, and the ready laughing acceptance of those who, in the day, commanded them.

"Why?" said Clarice Stuart, when she had once voiced this amazement. "Putting a different coat on them isn't going to change them, is it? Lud bless you, girl, I thought the way you did, once. I got over it quickly! Do you want to know my first experience here, when I got to New York? An eye-opener, let me tell you! I was substitute on a surgical case,—private house, patient sleeping under opiates,—when Doctor Outerwaite, the same we were with the other night up at the Arena, came in for examination. 'Course, in that case, the family always go out of the room until the examination is over. Outerwaite! Lord, we'd heard nothing but Outerwaite all through the West! I was frightened stiff! They say he's a devil in the operating-room, swearing like a trooper if everything doesn't go like clockwork! Imagine me! First case in little New York! Well, I shooed the family out, closed the doors and stood at the patient's side—he quite out of his head, delirium and opiates; me watching the Doc, and ready to jump at a sneeze. And what do you think he did? Go to the patient? Nixie! He came straight up to little me, slipped his arm around, and said:

"'Why, you beautiful creature! where did you come from?'"

She laughed in a superior worldly way, adding:

"They're not all that way; but there are some gay boys! Lord! I could tell you some story! I say, Dodo, if you ever get appendicitis, let me know. I'll fix it for you so it won't cost you a cent!"

So even distinguished surgeons, men of international reputation, had their little excursions behind the scenes, vulnerable as the rest before an impertinent, defiant Salamander! Curious, she asked questions, seeking to know how such wardrobes grew from modest salaries. Clarice was nothing if not direct.

"Graft!" she said, with a shrug of her shoulders. "Of course, the wages are good, but they don't set up a wardrobe of Paris models, do they? Well, it's a question of presents, see?" She laughed, shrugging her shoulders. "A patient you've pulled through pneumonia, or a case of trepanning, has a right to periodic fits of gratitude, hasn't he? And, of course, when you leave there's always a present—money, if you're supporting the family at home." She emphasized this with a wink. "When you get a club man, a good sport who's been in a blue funk at dying, it shapes up pretty well! Of course, when you strike a woman, it's a scarf or a kimono. But we've been rather lucky!"

Then, become suddenly serious, she continued thoughtfully:

"I say, Dodo, it's real curious, the effect you get over a man when he's pulling out of a smashing illness! You know, if I'd wanted to I could have married—" She stopped, lost in a reverie. "A nice boy, too. Sometimes I think I was a fool!"

"Will you marry?" said Dodo curiously.

"Anita says she will. Don't know about little me. I'm engaged, you know." She held up two fingers and laughed: "But, lord! there's no hurry. It's such fun as it is!"

As she grew more confidential (and secrecy was not her failing), DorÉ herself was surprised at the daring of the nurse's life. She spoke lightly of things that DorÉ did not approve of—now. She had met men in unconventional ways, without introduction, according to a fancy—the expression is "picked up." When DorÉ demurred, she said, with western frankness:

"Say, how would I meet them, then? Oh, I manage them all right—after! That's where their little surprise comes in!"

And she began to tell of the time when she had flirted with two well-known club men at the Horse Show, men who were dying to speak to her, but were afraid on account of the presence of curious others. But, in passing near them, they had slipped their cards into her pocket. Of course, she had not written them—she had met them by chance afterward at a restaurant; but she had not been offended by their advance. They were of her steady acquaintance now.

But DorÉ's incursion into this curious society brought her small amusement. She grew tired quickly of these too easily read admirers. Then after what she had known, they were all second-chop. The company of Estelle Monks interested her more. Since the morning she had surprised her in the office of the Free Press, her curiosity had been stirred to further investigation. Estelle Monks herself forestalled her. She came into her rooms suddenly one morning, and plumping down, abruptly inquired:

"Do me a favor, Dodo?"

"Any!"

"Don't mention to Mr. Harrigan Blood that I inhabit these quarters!"

DorÉ, puzzled, a little embarrassed too, moved away, saying:

"What do you mean? Why not?"

"No offense to you, bless you!" said Estelle Monks, with a curious smile. "You see, I'm on the paper. He—well, he wouldn't quite relish the idea of tripping over me when he turns up with a bunch of flowers."

"You exaggerate," said DorÉ nervously. "Harrigan Blood's not really interested."

"H. B.'s a damned fascinating man," said Estelle Monks directly, "but he doesn't like reporters about, whether he's serious or not—particularly his own reporters."

"He's not serious!" said DorÉ.

Estelle Monks smiled.

"That is, he only thinks he is."

"I guess you understand him, don't you?" said Estelle Monks, still smiling.

"Yes!" She looked at her friend, interested. "What are you doing on the paper? You never told any one."

"Raise your hand and cross your heart!" said Estelle solemnly. "I'm Ferdie Amsterdam."

"You?" said DorÉ in amazement. For under that pseudonym was conducted the famous society column of the Free Press.

"Expert on the Four Hundred—social dictionary."

"Honest?"

"Since two months!"

"But how do you manage?"

She told her story. She had come from San Francisco, where she had done some clever work on the papers. She had a few letters of introduction, and she knew a few men of the journalist emigration. She had gone to the Free Press office with an article in hand, Impressions of a Western Girl.

"What, it was you?" said DorÉ, suddenly enlightened.

"Don't wonder you didn't recognize the photo. Belonged to some one on the coast. Wrote my article in Chicago—fake, of course, but highly seasoned. I handed it over as if I owned a Middle West chain of papers; told them I'd go out and work up the names. But the feeling was all right, so it was! The stuff went big; I was fixed!"

DorÉ was on the point of divulging her own experience, and how she had been outstripped; but she held her tongue with a new caution, asking:

"But the society game, Estelle—how do you know about that?"

"I don't!" she answered frankly. "It started as a joke; it made good! The real Ferdie Amsterdam—that's to say, the last of the line, an old maid called Benticker—got a pain somewhere and was carted off to the hospital. I was put on the column and told to fill it up somehow. I sent in a hurry call to a couple of my friends, Ben Brown and Will Cutter—you know them, big magazine specialists—and we sat down with a couple of weeklies, and doped out a cracker-jack story. It amused them. They used to laugh themselves sick over being Ferdie Amsterdam. Since then we lunch at Lazare's every day and dope it out. And say, the boss is so tickled, he's raised my rates! What do you think of that? 'Course, now I'm getting the jargon, going out and meeting people—"

"Going out?" said DorÉ, opening her eyes.

"Some! Ferdie Amsterdam gets a bid to any big affair that's pulled off. Say, the way these leaders of society currycomb your back would paralyze you! Trouble to get information? Why, they're dying to crowd into print!"

"And so that's the way you worked it," said DorÉ musingly.

"Sure. Drop in to lunch with me and see the board in session!"

DorÉ liked Estelle Monks. There was something self-reliant and businesslike about her that inspired confidence. She had a big point of view, one who had unbounded charity and understanding. She invited DorÉ to go with her as her guest to several affairs, musicales, large balls and tableaux, but the invitation was always declined. As she knew her, though, DorÉ was surprised to find how naturally this confident little worker, with the slow and alluring smile, gathered about her men from the most fashionable sets, men whom she converted into friends, firm in their respect. She admired this gift, knowing how much more difficult it is to establish a friendship than to begin a flirtation.

She went once or twice to luncheon with her, amused at the facile clever way Estelle Monks enlisted the services of two such celebrities as Ben Brown and Will Cutter, and that in friendship solely. It must be a gift—a gift that was not in DorÉ's power. Even on the few occasions she met them, Will Cutter looked at her with awakened fixity, very different from the way he beamed jovially on Estelle Monks. A smile, and DorÉ felt he would enlist under her banner. But she steadfastly resisted this disloyalty; for among Salamanders etiquette is strict, and possession is all points of the law.

For three weeks, then, she sought to immerse herself in this old life—sharing the surface confidences of the Salamanders, playing her part in little financial intrigues, running into pawn-shops with Winona, or making profitable arrangements at Pouffe's for the crediting on flowers withheld for Ida Summers, who was new; working up the birthday game for Clarice and Anita, when consulted by admirers as to what would please these difficult ladies; raising her own capital by the reselling of the bi-weekly basket of champagne from Peavey, the flowers that Stacey, Gilday and Sassoon assiduously offered, receiving her share of convertible presents from chance admirers, hooked for a week or two—at the bottom without zest, sick at heart, tired of it all. Then, all at once, one morning after she had gone to the door of the court-house where Massingale was holding court, in a sudden revulsion she fled to Blainey's office, wildly resolved on escape.

Two days later she found herself in Buffalo, inscribed on the list of a stock company, resolved to stay for months until her mental balance had been regained and the deep wound in her heart had become but a faint scar. She stayed just two weeks. The quiet, the relaxed air, life in so many ruts of the little big town, awoke in her a fear of the past, of being sucked back into the oblivion of early days, as if what she feared night and day had already begun—retrogression. Was that the true reason of her return, or was there some impelling magnet too compelling to be resisted, or even to be acknowledged?

She came directly into Blainey's office, profiting by her entrÉe which carried her triumphantly past the crowded anteroom, where old and young, the hopeful and the resigned, the restlessly impatient and the soddenly passive, waited wearily, watching her with hostile eyes.

"Well, Blainey, I'm back!" she said abruptly, and nodding at the dapper secretary, she added: "Send him out! I want to talk to you."

"Well, kid?" he said, studying her shrewdly when they were alone.

"Well, I'm going to be square with you!" she said, crossing her arms defiantly. "I'm miserable, Blainey!"

"Trouble here?" he said, laying a fat forefinger on his heart.

"Yes."

"Em—bad!" he said solemnly. He flung away the half smoked cigar, chose another and nervously turned it in his fingers. "So I'd sized it up—well, we all get it. Why? Lord love me, of all I've watched and stirred up, that's what gets me—why a damned clever girl like you, or a cold-headed old son-of-a-gun like me should ever fall—I'm sorry, kid! Are you going to make a fool of yourself?"

"I don't know, Blainey," she said, shrugging her shoulders. She had a feeling, all at once, of confidence in his rough common sense.

"That's queer. I thought you were too keen!" He was thinking of Sassoon, wondering if she would throw away such an opportunity for a short romance. "Some youngster, eh?—without a cent—talking big!"

He lighted the cigar and puffed it reflectively.

"Kid, we Americans are a bunch of damned fools. Sentiment's our middle name! Why should I hand you a line of talk? Haven't I fallen for it a dozen times? Yes, and ready to begin all over again! We've got to love some one, or we get to wabbling!"

He looked at her, and again he thought of Sassoon, and what the situation might yield. He wanted to be honest with her, to give her good advice according to his lights.

"So that's why you shot off to Buffalo, eh?" he said, with a long whistle. "Bad theory! Stay by it; see the fellow ten times a day—that sometimes cures. Say, I'm going to hand you the truth like a Dutch uncle! You've got things going your way; you've got the whole game before you, cinched." He hesitated. "Sassoon, ready to back you to the limit, opportunity, money backing; you know the place."... He waved contemptuously at the warring world of the Rialto below—"And you know the game. Sassoon's good for thousands—in your hands. And then, there's the advertisement! Don't lose your head over a couple of square shoulders!"

She did not set him right. For her purposes she preferred that he should entirely misconceive her. She allowed him to go on, volunteering his worldly, well meant advice.

"All you say is true," she said finally, with an indefinable smile. "Blainey, I've always said I would make up my mind at twenty-three. Be patient. It may be sooner!"

"Wish I could take twenty-five years off my back," he said slowly, without rising. "Take your time—take your time; and if you get weepy, come in and use my shoulder. Understand?"

He rang the bell, waved his hand cheerily and watched her until she disappeared. She went, strongly impressed by his kindness, half inclined impulsively to return and begin in earnest.

She had gone directly to him from the station. Now she returned to Miss Pim's. When she was back once more in her own room, the sensation of homecoming was so acute that she could have sat down in the middle of the floor and cried for joy. But in another moment Ida Summers rushed in.

"Dodo! The Lord be praised! You saved my life! Dinner, theater and a gorgeous cabaret affair afterwards. Vaughan Chandler's coming for me at seven—I promised to get another girl. Every one you know is going. Every one's been asking for you. Swear you'll come?"

"Come? You bet I will!" she cried with a great burst of relief, flinging herself frantically in Ida's arms.

At eleven o'clock, after dinner and the theater they started in a party of six, hilariously, for Healey's, where a dozen crowds were to congregate for an impromptu cabaret dance. She felt elated, gloriously happy. It seemed to her as if she had regained the mastery of herself again, that the old zest had returned with the incipient flirtation which she had already begun with two irreproachable youths who sought discreetly to touch her hand in the confusion of the bumping ride, or to gaze deep, with ardent soulful messages, into her mocking eyes of cloudy blue. After all, the voluntary exile had served its purpose. It had showed her the stupidity of moping. Life was too short to be taken seriously. Admiration of ten men was better, more exhilarating, more exciting, than ridiculous fancied passions au serieux. She was so happy, so brilliantly gay, liberated in spirit, avid for excitement and admiration, that even Vaughan Chandler, Ida's cavalier by rights, watched her with amazed disloyal eyes.

Others were before them in the great Jungle Room which had been reserved. From below they heard the barbaric swinging music of stringed instruments, and divined the laughing, swaying, gliding confusion of dancers. DorÉ, with brilliant eyes and impatient tripping feet, hurried them on, eager to lose herself in the swirling throbbing measures, and the first two persons she saw on entering, were—Lindaberry and Judge Massingale!