Yes, it was true. It must have been the beginning of all things. Man, pitiless, deaf, blind, groping in the darkness, knowing not even himself. And to her vision, far off, out of the mist, he shaped himself before her: that dim, first standard-bearer of the Lord, the man who first felt pity. Savage, brutish, dumb—lonely there amid the desolation, staring down at some hurt creature, man or beast it mattered not, his dull eyes troubled with a strange new pain he understood not. “Oh, yes, there’s no make-believe this time,” answered the girl. “A bad thing for her if he wasn’t.”!

She had not told him of the Phillips episode. But she felt instinctively that he knew. It was always a little mysterious to her, his perception in matters pertaining to herself. “I might,” he answered, “if I had known the value of it. I found a cable waiting for me in New York. My father had been dead a month; and I had to return immediately.”

“What’s he like in himself?” he asked her. “You’ve been seeing something of him, haven’t you?” “I know an old actress,” he continued. “She’s the mother of four. They are all on the stage and they’ve all made their mark. The youngest was born in her dressing-room, just after the curtain had fallen. She was playing the Nurse to your mother’s Juliet. She is still the best Nurse that I know. ‘Jack’s always worrying me to chuck it and devote myself to the children,’ she confided to me one evening, while she was waiting for her cue. ‘But, as I tell him, I’m more helpful to them being with them half the day alive than all the day dead.’ That’s an anecdote worth remembering, when your time comes. If God gives woman a drum he doesn’t mean man to take it away from her. She hasn’t got to be playing it for twenty-four hours a day. I’d like you to have seen your mother’s Cordelia.” “Yes,” she answered. “And I’m glad that I did it,” she added, defiantly.