Prompt as Maud was in responding to Dita's plea for her immediate presence, Dita was equally prompt in hurling herself upon her friend's sympathetic bosom.

Maud had been shown at once to the sitting-room of Mrs. Hepworth's personal suite of apartments, and there Dita sat in the dim and depressing gloaming of the unlighted chamber, a figure of dejection.

She had not even removed her hat, but sat brooding in the twilight until Maud's entrance roused her and she flung herself across the room and into the latter's arms with the impetuous rush of a cyclone.

Dita was temperamentally far more given to anger than to tears, but the strain of the last two days had culminated now in a burst of wild weeping, and Maud found it necessary to soothe and calm her before she could venture to inquire into the immediate cause of her friend's very poignant and unfeigned distress; so she applied herself to the task of consolation with only vague conjectures as to the cause for grief.

She was able, however, from Dita's almost incoherent statements, to patch together a fairly accurate idea of what had occurred.

"Just read this letter," Dita thrust the sheets into Maud's hand. "Oh, you can not, not in this light. Wait a moment," she touched a button and the room was flooded with a rose-colored radiance. Maud stepped nearer one of the lamps and gave her most earnest attention to the words Cresswell Hepworth had written. His utterance through the medium of the pen, was brief, self-controlled, restrained and to the point. And as Maud read his well-considered words, something like a feeling of despair swept over her.

"He has gone, actually gone," cried Dita, as Maud handed the letter back to her without comment. "Gone," she repeated the words as if the fact in itself were quite unbelievable. She crushed the letter in her hand and threw it on the floor. "He will be gone months, looking after his mines and railroads and I'm to stay here. He never even said good-by to me, and this," she touched the crumpled ball of paper contemptuously with her foot, "gives me very plainly to understand that it is a virtual separation. Oh," she jerked the pins out of her hat and sent that plumey velvet head-covering spinning across the room, then turned to her calm and sympathetic friend with a real fear and a real appeal in her eyes. "What am I going to do? For a few months it will be all right, and then people will begin to talk like everything. And you know how it will appear. Every one will say that Cresswell discovered that I was having an affair with some one, Eugene, of course, and that he, Cresswell, and I had a row and that he refused to live with me longer, but that he nevertheless was so chivalrous that he turned over this house and the country places to me. Oh, dear, why did I have to have a sirocco?"

"Heaven knows," said Maud. "Let it be a lesson to you. Never have another one. There, there, dear, I didn't mean any reproaches or I told-you-sos. So stop howling or you'll mar your beauty permanently. Oh, now, don't lift your head and glare at me indignantly and say you hope you will, that it's never been anything but a curse to you. I've been too plain all my life to listen with patience to anything of the kind. Now, let me think." She sat with finger on lip deeply considering, while Dita still punctured the silence with loud occasional sobs.

"You will have to travel," she said decisively. "Yup will have to travel until people begin to talk and then you will have to keep on traveling until they stop talking. But oh, Dita, can't you try and patch it up?"

Her words gave fresh impetus to Perdita's gradually decreasing sobs. "You do not know him," she wept, "and to tell the truth, neither do I; but I have enough of an understanding of him to know that he always considers a step very thoroughly before he takes it, looks well into the chasm before he leaps, and it's no use trying to get him to change his mind when he has decided what course he means to pursue. Anyway, I do not wish it. I want to be free, but not this way. Oh, was ever a woman placed in such a position as I? I believe Cresswell would forgive anything but the sin of not knowing one's own mind and I had to confess to him last night that I wasn't sure of mine or of my heart either. He has a contempt for me, of course, and," rising restlessly and moving about, "I can't and won't accept his contempt, and I can't and won't continue to live on his money and potter about his old houses. I feel as if I would rather die."

"But, dearest," cried Maud bewildered. "What else is there for you to do? What else can you do?"

"Nothing apparently," she said. Her dark gown fell about her in the long lines of perfect grace. As she stood there, beautiful as the tragic muse, her great eyes transfixed Maud with her scorn, but the scorn was not for her friend, but for herself. "What can I do? I am about the most useless creature on all this green earth. I sit and cry at a situation which tortures my pride, instead of coming to a decision. I made a beggardly pittance trying to earn my own living, and I won't go back to that kind of life, a disgusting, sordid, scrimpy life, which stifled every generous impulse or spontaneous action. I will not go back, I will not give up all the things I love and have become accustomed to. I was born to this. I love it, and will have it, but not on these terms.

"I haven't been utterly futile here, as I was in those other circumstances. I have made Cresswell Hepworth's upholstery, stiff houses, 'decorated and furnished by the most expensive and artistic firms,' look really livable and lovely. Truly, haven't I? Great artists have raved over them. Oh, I'm not afraid of velvets and tapestries and embroideries. I have no burgeois reverence for them. Color was always like clay to me. I always long to take it and mold it into new combinations. Why, I couldn't keep my hands off a rainbow if I got a chance at it, even the angels couldn't shoo me away." She was in one of her swift, mercurial changes of mood, her mouth dimpling, her eyes sparkling. "I'm not afraid of all the splendor of color or of all the gorgeously rich materials that God or man ever devised. I ache to take them and combine them and melt them together and contrast them. I'll dare any combination to get an effect I want, an effect that haunts me, and is like music in my consciousness. Isn't it strange that I can do anything I like with great heavy draperies? I wave my hand at them and they fall into just the lines I want. I can get all kinds of effects in a room, but give me a little palette with little gobs of paint on it, and little, little brushes and I can't do even a decent lamp mat. That is one reason Eugene and I have always understood each other so well. He, too, knows the call of color. Oh, stop looking that way, as if I were going straight to shipwreck just because I mention Eugene. The important thing to consider now is what I am going to do."

"I've told you once," said Maud, with settled conviction; "travel."

"On Cresswell's money?" bitterly. "Well, I suppose you think it's either that or huddling into some black hole and attempting to earn my living again—a phrase that's the synonym for me of a cheap and nasty experience, but there must be some way out. No, I am utterly wasted, futile, ineffective. I do not believe, I solemnly do not believe, that I have one single, solitary gift in this world except being pretty."

"Look at me!" said Maud with a rather whimsical, cynical little smile. "I think that I'm the living proof of one of your especial gifts. Why, Dita, my dear, I'm a creation of yours. I'm considered one of the most stunning women in town and about the best dressed and," Maud's really soft and attractive smile transfixed her face, "I've won, I am really beginning to dare to believe it, the interest and I hope the affection of the only man I ever cared for and who never gave me a glance when I was just 'that plain Maud Carmine, who is musical, you know.' Oh, I mean Wallace, of course," blushing. "I haven't got over the wonder of it yet, I assure you. I'm still mentally pinching myself and saying, 'If this be I.' Think of it, Dita! I know the treasures of the socially humble, if any one does. I always had position, but that amounts to very little in these days, unless one has other things to back it up. It has been gradually losing importance, pushed to the wall by money, the ability to entertain, personal charm and good clothes, an air, a flare, a wit; until now the poor, solemn, superannuated thing, so long unduly revered, is really trotted back into the corner. Yes, I had position, but not recognition. The back seats for me, so I rubbed along on my music and conversation as best I could, poor fool! And then you came, and waved your magic wand over me, took me in hand, and the world began to appraise me at your valuation."

"That was nothing," said Dita carelessly. "I just have the knack of seeing people as they ought to be. I could do what I did for you with anybody, if they would only let me. You were nice and plastic and put yourself entirely in my hands."

"Plastic!" echoed Maud. "You mean hopeless! But turn about is fair play. Take the advice I offer you, and travel. If you say the word we'll start for Japan to-morrow. And you needn't touch a penny of your husband's money either, my child. I have enough for both of us."

"Maud, you're a darling." Dita smiled in warm appreciation. "But—"

"But, Dita," Maud's voice held both fear and appeal, "if you do stay here, you will not, you must not see Eugene Gresham."

Dita smiled at her again, inscrutably. "An idea has come to me," she said, quite irrelevantly, "a dazzling idea. I really believe that it is the solution of the whole matter."

She considered this dazzling idea, her eyes growing brighter every moment.

"Oh, Maud, Maud!" she cried, clasping her hands, "what an inspiration! I'm going on my own again. Yes, I am. Don't look so horrified. I know I've grouched and fussed a lot over my past efforts in that direction, but you see I tried to do things in a small way, cotillion favors and such, and it didn't suit me. It wasn't my mÉtier, not my way. I loathe detail. I can do things on a big scale or not at all. You know that. And my present idea means the big scale. When I first came to New York I regarded it as the great adventure, but then I didn't know how to go about anything. I was as ignorant as a baby of everything—everything. The tremendous professional skill required, my own ineptitude, the utter inadequacy of my poor, amateur accomplishments, my entire ignorance of business methods, all frightened, dazed, stupefied me, but now, now, I just believe I'll have another try."

"Oh, what have you got in your head now?" cried Maud in frightened resignation.

"You see it's like this," Dita ignored the question and continued to follow her own train of thought. "New York demands one of two things of the stranger who comes knocking at her gates, either training or a new idea. She can take care of any trained person, but if she has to conduct the educational process, she does it with a club. Now I'm going back to her with my new idea. Oh, I was crushed a bit ago, but now I am really enjoying myself as I have not done since the first dazzle of marrying Cresswell and seeing his money turn itself so easily into the beautiful things I had longed for all my life. But I've been getting tireder and tireder of being the twittering canary in the gilded cage. Cresswell opened the door last night and now I'm going to fly put, but in a totally different direction from the one he expects me to take." She laughed delightedly. "Oh, do you think New York will listen to my new idea?"

"She'll listen to Mrs. Cresswell Hepworth," said Maud dryly. "It won't make much difference about the idea, whether it's new or old." She thought of a conversation Hepworth's friends had held at the wedding breakfast and sighed reminiscently. "I'm afraid you're making Cress rather a background."

"Why not?" said Dita cheerfully and defiantly. "Serves him right, going away in the fashion he did and putting me in such a position. 'Moses an' Aaron,' as my old mammy used to say, you needn't try to dissuade me. You'll be as crazy about the idea as I am when I unfold it to you. The twittering canary is going to hop out of the gilded cage, and build her own nest. It's the great adventure. It is to live. Won't Cresswell open those sleepy eyes of his when he sees this move of mine on the chessboard? I'm done with failure, this venture of ours is a success before it's begun."