One morning two weeks after the summer season at Jollyland had ended Jimmy found himself in a state of moody dejection in the club car of a fast express train en route from Washington to Baltimore. He dropped into a chair in the rear end of the car and let himself slowly slide forward until his shoulder blades nearly touched the seat. He swung one leg over the other, wedged both hands into his trousers pockets and puffed viciously at the somewhat frayed cigarette which hung from one corner of his mouth.

Somehow or other his brain wasn’t functioning properly. His imagination wasn’t yielding up the customary assortment of bizarre ideas and freak suggestions from which he always was able to select one particular inspiration to serve the need of the moment. To make the situation more exasperating the last words of Meyerfield kept bobbing up in his train of thought. He could see and hear the manager of the famous “Meyerfield Frolics” as he had stood in the lobby of the New National Theatre in Washington the night before, smoking the inevitable cigar and talking in a loud booming voice.

“Remember,” Meyerfield had announced with great impressiveness, “I want you to smear us all over the front page of every paper in Baltimore. We’ve never played the ‘Frolics’ there and we’ve got to have ’em properly introduced. I’m depending upon you to plant something that will stir that town up like an earthquake. Get the girls into it some way. They’re the best card we have.”

As Jimmy slouched in his seat the memory of a hundred spectacular exploits which he had engineered swam through his mind, but he couldn’t fasten on a new idea or on anything that hadn’t been worked and re-worked. He was just beginning his first season with Meyerfield and that worthy was a showman who expected results.

A memory picture of Lolita flashed into his mind and with it came the realizing sense that her silence was perhaps responsible for his present frame of mind. Since he said good-bye to her in New York a week before to go ahead of the “Frolics” there had been only two letters from her, letters written on the first two days of their separation. In the last she had mentioned, with great enthusiasm, that she had signed a contract to play a tiny part with a road company which was to regale the theatre-goers of the small towns in the Middle West with a chaste little farce then sensationally successful in New York. It was called “Ursula’s Undies,” and it was a dainty affair designed to provoke the curiosity of that type of male who carries around a pen-holder with a little glass-eye piece at one end. You look in at his suggestion (he’s sure to ask you) and you behold a couple of large and lumpy females in one-piece bathing suits in what is alleged to be a scene suggestive of Oriental abandon. “Ursula’s Undies” wasn’t even as wicked as that, but its advertising manager distinctly sought to convey the impression that it was too terrible for words and Jimmy had been moved to remonstrate with Lolita by means of a telegram in which he had rather peremptorily directed her to throw up her job and “get into something decent.”

There had been no reply to this wire nor to a frantic series of letters which had followed it and Jimmy had begun to fancy that morning that all was lost. He turned and looked out at the endless procession of fleeting telegraph poles and at the dreary landscape apparently afloat in a shimmering haze of mist which had followed a drizzling rain. He was aroused from his reveries by a pleasant voice, a voice with something a bit “precious” in its soft cadences, a voice that betokened a rather too thick overlay of what Jimmy scornfully called “culchaw.”

“Good morning, Mr. Martin,” said the voice. “What’s the matter? You seem sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”

Jimmy turned and recognized the speaker, a tall young man who wore enormous tortoise shell spectacles, an impeccable two button cutaway and a smile in which there was a touch of supercilious superiority. He was one of Jimmy’s pet aversions, a highbrow press agent—J. Herbert Denby by name—who was “doing a little special literary work,” as he himself described it, ahead of a company that was presenting a repertoire of dank and morbid Scandinavian plays on tour. He had been associate editor of a literary magazine and had written a number of choice essays on what he called the “new movement in the theatre” which had been published in more or less obscure periodicals and which had been undoubtedly unread by a vast multitude of persons. He was now enjoying his first experience in the business world of the theatre and he had met Jimmy a few nights before in Washington. His abysmal ignorance of practicalities had aroused a sympathetic feeling in the latter which had been later completely dissipated by his patronizing manner. His company was to be Jimmy’s “opposition” in Baltimore, and he was journeying there on the same errand that Jimmy was.

“Good morning,” grunted Jimmy. “What’s that you say?”

“I say that you seem sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,” responded Mr. Denby, sitting down in the next chair with great deliberation and carefully disposing of the tails of his coat. “By that I mean that you seem lost in abstraction, as it were.”

“Not as it were,” replied Jimmy. “As it is. I’m certainly lost in abstraction all right, all right, only I never called it that before. The old idea box ain’t workin’ right. It’s back firin’ on me.”

“What’s the problem?” asked Mr. Denby judicially. “Maybe I can be of some slight assistance. We represent opposite poles of the world of the theatre, but an interchange of thought may clear up the situation.”

“The problem is one that can’t be cleared up by a flossy little piece of writin’ marked ‘not duplicated in your city,’ old scout,” replied Jimmy disconsolately. “Essays ain’t any more use in this situation than curry combs in a garage.”

“But perhaps I may be able to venture a practical suggestion that might be of value,” persisted the other.

“Practical suggestion!” snorted Jimmy. “Not a chance. You fellows are all right, I guess, for this Ibsen stuff, but you don’t know anything about girl shows, not a single, little thing.”

“I presume you mean the chorus girls,” suggested Mr. Denby. “Do you wish to use them in some way for publicity purposes?”

“You’re talking,” said Jimmy. “I not only wish to I’ve got to. I’ve got to smear ’em over the front pages of all the papers in Baltimore to keep my job. And, believe me, Baltimore is some tight town when it comes to handin’ out space for the showshops. The lid’s on and you’ve got to murder someone to get it off.”

Mr. J. Herbert Denby cocked his head at a thoughtful angle and gazed judicially through his spectacles.

“It mightn’t be a bad idea,” he said finally, weighing every word carefully, “to get a delegation of prominent citizens to meet them at the station with automobiles. Had you thought of that?”

Jimmy turned a look of concentrated scorn on him that would have caused an ordinary mortal to shrivel up and pass quietly and unobtrusively into a state of complete dissolution, but it had no such effect on J. Herbert. He simply smiled a superior smile and awaited an answer.

“And it would be a good stunt, too,” snapped Jimmy, “to get the Governor of the State to dance the tango with Madeline La Verne in the waiting room of the station and to arrange to have the professors at the university carry all the girls on their backs up to the hotel. For the love of Mike, talk sense, man.”

“Of course, they would have to be extremely prominent citizens,” went on J. Herbert Denby, utterly ignoring Jimmy’s biting sarcasm, “the leading men of the city. It might be possible to arrange to have them go over to Washington in their cars and bring the young ladies to Baltimore in them instead of just meeting them at the station. That would add a touch of piquancy to the proceedings that——”

He got no farther, for Jimmy choked off further utterance by springing up and grabbing both his hands in wild exultation, almost upsetting the porter who was emptying a bottle of mineral water for the man in the next seat.

“You’ve got it, you old highbrow son-of-a-gun,” he shouted. “You don’t know how good it is yourself. You know that old stuff about ‘and a child shall lead them on.’ Well, that’s you. No offense, mind you, no offense, but you are a child in this line. I’ve got a notion to kiss you right out in public.”

J. Herbert backed away and almost landed in the lap of a stout party who was reading a paper.

“Please don’t,” he murmured. “Please don’t, I pray. It would embarrass me fearfully.”

The stout party turned to his companion and spoke quietly under the cover of his hand.

“Nuts,” he confided. “Pure Brazilian.”

Jimmy bade J. Herbert Denby a most enthusiastic farewell at the station in Baltimore.

“There’s a dinner coming to you, old George B. Bookworm,” he shouted as he jumped into a taxicab, “a nice young dinner with a little grape on the sidelines and no stops for way-stations when we get our feet under the table. See you later, old dear.”