He beamed more beamishly than ever. "Say, listen, girlie," he said, "I've had the deuce of a time, losin' you every time I find you! Say, I was startin' to tell you the other day,--the wife gimme fits when I told her about you. Sure, she did." I stood very still and looked at him and listened. "Yeah. Calls me a big b.o.o.b. 'You big b.o.o.b,' she says. 'You sleeper! Her tellin' you she was a stranger and all that, and lookin' for work, an' you never give her my address!' Honest, she trimmed me for fair. I got to beat it now, but here's her card, see?--Telephone'n everything, and she wants you to call her up. She wants to have you out to dinner, Aggie does, and have you meet some of her lady friends and get you acquainted. Say, ring her up, will you, sure? Gee, she was some sore at the old man! Bye!"

He leaped into his Express, and vanished, and I could have sat down in the midst of the scurrying crowd and wept with shame and joy and grat.i.tude. I rang Aggie up at once, and I could just _see_ her, from her cozy voice.

How about it, Emma Ellis? Do I score? I'm dining with them soon.

JANE.

P.S.--Do you realize that my month is up? And my point is won? But I'm going to stay on and see my nymph safely through her dark days.

_A Week Later._

Denny and I went to see "Twin Hearts" this evening and in the meltingest part of the film he held my hand. I thought it was about time to unmask, so I said--retrieving my hand--that I wasn't a regular kitchen mechanic but a volunteer.

"My real job," I said, "is writing. I'm a writer."

"Sure you are!" he chuckled delightedly. "You'n me both! I wrote this spiel here! I'm Henry W. d.i.c.kens!"

I couldn't seem to convince him of anything but that I was "some little kidder." He undertook to tell the world about that. To-morrow, in the garish light of day, when he dumps his neat parcels on my spotless table, I must really explain that----

_The Next Afternoon._

DEAR E.E. AND M.D.,

I'm perished for sleep, but I'll write what I can. Just as I got to "that" above, my nymph called me. She was ill,--terribly, terrifyingly ill, and even I saw that there wasn't an instant to lose. And not a soul to send to the telephone.

I couldn't leave her--but I had to leave her! It didn't enter my head to be afraid--only of not getting the doctor in time. Denny's warnings were forgotten. I had done one block of the five when a man stepped out of a dark hallway, and halted in front of me.

Even then, until he spoke, I wasn't really frightened. But when he did,--I tell you, Emma Ellis and Michael Daragh, all the horror and wickedness, all the filth and sin of the world seemed to be closing in on me, stifling me, blinding me, hobbling my feet. All the windows about me were blank and black; a block and a half ahead of me was a blaze of light--Boldini's Saloon--"a rotten bad one," Denny had said.

I ran, oh, how I ran, but he ran, too, faster, faster. I tried to reach out for something to cling to--for a shield--Just fragments came--"_angels charge over thee ... snare of the fowler ... terror by night_...."

We were almost at Boldini's Saloon, and I couldn't run any faster, and twice he had caught hold of my arm.... Suddenly another fragment came--"_in all thy ways_ ..." _All!_ I ran through the swinging doors into the saloon, out of the horrid, dark night into the horrid light, and I stumbled and went down onto my knees and pulled myself up by the bar, and I heard my voice--"Men--men--_Please_--I was going to the drug store to telephone--a woman is sick--a baby--she's all alone there--and this man--this man--" I hung onto the edge of the bar and everything spun dizzily round with me, but I saw three men bolt through the door and fall upon him.

Michael Daragh, I suppose some day I can remember with horror how they beat him, but I can't now. I can't be sorry for him. I can't be anything but gloatingly glad. They were drunk, all of them, but when they finished with him they escorted me to the drug store, one on each side and one marching on before and banged up the night man and while I telephoned the doctor they waited for me, and then they took me home.

I wanted to scream with laughter--they couldn't walk straight, two of them--and I wanted more to cry,--"_angels charge over thee_--" They were! I shook hands with them and thanked them, and they mounted guard outside the house and I flew in to my lady.

Well, presently the doctor came, and then the nurse came, and then Roderick Frost III came, a frantic young man with penitent eyes, and presently Roderick Frost _IV_ came, a bad-tempered young tenor who protested l.u.s.tily at being born in a spot so far removed from his own rightful social orbit, and then morning came, and I fell into bed for three hours of sodden sleep.

Now the haughty chef from the Lake Sh.o.r.e Drive is here, taking royal charge, and Edna Miles' job is over. I'm going to see little Miss Marjorie and 'fess up, and take farewell of Mrs. Mussel and my kind S.F., and then, my dears, I'm coming home,--home with palms of victory.

Haven't I won, Emma Ellis? Haven't I won, Michael Daragh? Do you dare to count the one exception that gloriously proved the rule? Didn't my three unsteady angels more than make up for one poor devil? Nearly six weeks alone in the wide, cold world, dozens of kindly conductors and policemen and L guards and clerks and fellow citizens, the kind little floorwalker and Denny Dolan, and the beamish Buffalo and THE MAIDEN'S DREAM, and my three avenging knights!

Own up, old dears! Admit you're beaten! I have walked _The Narrow Path_ and found it clean and safe and good!

Triumphantly--gloatingly--

JANE.

CHAPTER XV

It would be the private opinion of Emma Ellis to her dying day that Miss Vail had suppressed a good deal and had embellished a good deal, in that dramatic way of hers. She had written so much fiction and lived so much in her imagination that it was doubtful if she could (with the best intentions) tell the exact and unadorned truth about anything. Besides, even if things had happened exactly as she had chronicled them, it was not a fair test anyway; it was a very different case from those of the heroines in the two stories. Jane Vail knew she was Jane Vail, with an a.s.sured position in the literary world and a large income, and that the whole thing was only play-acting after all. But with Mr. Daragh entirely convinced and more maudlinly worshipful than ever, what was the use of saying anything? But she could _think_.

Jane swung happily into her fourth year in New York, flying home to Sarah Farraday for Christmas, meeting the young year with high hopes and canny plans, a definite part, now, of the confraternity of ink. Her circle widened and widened; important persons came down from their heights of achievement to make much of her, and the late spring saw the successful launching of another gay little play, and early fall found her deep--head, hands, and heart--in her first serious novel, but she found amazing margins of time for Rodney Harrison, for Hope House, for Michael Daragh.

Sarah Farraday, resigned but never reconciled, shared vicariously in the life-more-abundantly which had come to her best friend, and she always said, with a small sigh, that nothing Jane did or said could ever surprise her again, but she was nevertheless startled, after a long silence, to receive a fat letter bearing a Mexican stamp.

_On a Meandering Train, bound, more or less for Guadalajara_, it began, and was dated December the seventh.

SALLY DEAR,

You must be thinking me quite mad at last, not hearing from me for weeks, and then--this! Like the old woman in the fairy tale,--"Can this be I?"

I decided all in a wink to fly to California and visit my mother's cousins, the Budders. I needed a drastic change, Sally. I haven't had a real play-time for a year, and it's four years and a month since I left home for New York--can you realize it? Four lucky, beautiful, shining years. But oh, I'm tired, old dear! So tired that my brain creaks. I think there comes a time, in creative work, for playing hooky. Write and run away and live to write another day. So I wired the Budders I was coming and took the train the same day, and when I reached San Francisco I found them all packed up for this Mexican trip,--indeed, they were sitting on their trunks with a tentative ticket for me in their hands. And I was pleased pink to come. The Budders (doesn't Budder sowd as if I ad a code id by ed?) are nice, comfortable creatures,--the sort who are called the salt of the earth but in reality aren't anything so piquant. They're the boiled potatoes and graham bread and rice pudding. You, now, Sally darling, are the angel cake, and there's not half enough of you; I'm the olives and anchovies and caviar ... a little goes a long way ... and Michael Daragh is the rich and creamy milk of human kindness, always being skimmed by a needy, greedy world.

Behold me, then, ambling through Mexico, a Spanish phrase book in my lap and peace in my heart.

_Adios!_

JANE.

P.S. I have just read this over, Sarah. Fiction of purest ray serene.

I'm not tired. I don't need to play. It was a very bad time for me to leave,--my work screamed after me all across the continent. I had to fly for my life and liberty.

Sally, friend of my youth, patient receptacle of all my moods and tenses, I was falling in love. At least, I felt myself slipping. All these four years I have intended Michael Daragh to be an interesting character part in my drama of New York, down in the cast as "her best friend." He is threatening to take the lead, and it isn't going to do at all. Sally, the man's goodness is simply ghastly; I couldn't endure having a husband so incontestibly better than I am. Why, you know that all my life I've been "a wonderful influence for good" with _man_kind! Didn't I always coax sling shots away from bad little boys and make them sign up for the S.P.C.A.? And wasn't I always getting bad big boys to smoke less and drink less and pa.s.s ex'es and dance with wallflowers and write to their mothers? Really, when I think of the twigs I've bent and the trees I've inclined, I feel that there should be a tablet erected to me somewhere. But the woman who weds Michael Daragh, I don't care who she is (lie: I care enormously!) will always be burning incense to him in her lesser soul, always straining on tiptoe to breathe the air in which he lives and moves and has his being.

Michael Daragh, that time he renounced the flesh-pots and "took to bride the Ladye Povertye with perfect blithenesse," did it so thoroughly that any literal spouse will be only a sort of morganatic wife, anyway. I don't mean that he might not adore her and be wonderful to her _after_ he'd ministered unto a drove of sticky immigrants and a Settlement full of drab down-and-outs and an Agnes Chatterton Home full of Fallen Sisters, but he would really expect her to _prefer_ having him a.s.sist at the arrival of the eleventh little Lascanowitz in a moldy cellar to keeping a birthday dinner date with her.

Now, Sally dear, in these four years since I left my village home (soft chords) I have labored somewhat, and I confess that I have frankly looked forward to matrimony as a sort of glorified vacation.

I couldn't ever give up my work, of course,--it wouldn't give me up--and I don't crave to "sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam and live upon strawberries, sugar and cream" exclusively, but somewhere in the middle ground between that and washing dishes and "feeding the swine," I did visualize a sort of gracious lady leisure, with a vague, worshipful being in the background making me "take care of myself."

Therefore, feeling myself melting unduly on the Irish question, I fly while there is yet time.

Much love, old dear!

JANE.

_December 8th._

That was a silly screed, yesterday, Sally dearest, but getting it off my chest was a great relief. And at that it wasn't a complete confession. There was another reason for a strategic retreat. The other reason was Rodney Harrison. Yes, the House of Harrison has capitulated, handsomely, lavishly, Mater and Pater as well, but I'm very sure that I can never be theirs. Just as I feel that Michael Daragh is too good for me, so do I feel that Rodney Harrison is not quite good enough! I mean by that not quite concerned enough with drying the world's tears. With--as G.B.S. says--"a character that needs looking after as much as my own," I feel I should have some one a little less Philistine than the cheerful Rodney. At any rate, I needed perspective on the whole situation, and who knows but I shall meet my nice new fate on this romantic pilgrimage? (Sounds more like eighteen than twenty-eight, doesn't it?) But, seriously, I've been so constantly with Michael Daragh and Rodney in these four years that I know every dip and spur, every line and leaf of their mental scenery; fresh fields and pastures new are what I need. And "one meets so many delightful people in traveling--" as witness the good Budders and their niece, Miss Vail ('sh ... they say she's a _writer_!)