He had looked up and caught me blushing a deep, painful red, but it wasn't on account of what he had intimated. I was blushing because of the discovery in myself of needs which, compared to the ideal of life I had set for myself, were as much of a defection as anything our conversation had suggested for Henry Mills. I was conscious in those days of a slow, steady seepage of all my forces toward desperation. "You'll have to take a company out for yourself," was Jerry's solution. "I'll write you a play. I've got a ripping idea--a man, with a gift, and two women, good women both of them--that's where I score against the eternal triangle--each of them trying to save him from the other and breaking him between them." Jerry's plays were never anything more than dramatizations of his immediate experience. "You and Sarah Croyden, you set each other off; I'll write it for both of you." He walked up and down in my little room with his hands in his pockets and his shining black hair rising like quills. "Jerry, how long will it take you to write that play? And how much will it cost to produce it?" "Ten thousand dollars," he answered to the last question. "About eighteen months if I go right at it." "And I've money enough to last me to the end of February. No," to his swift generous gesture. "You have to live eighteen months on yours--and another child coming." I made up my mind that I should have to speak to Pauline and Henry Mills. Greater than any mystery of creative art to me, is the mystery by which the recipients of its benefits manage to keep ignorant of its essential processes. I have never been able to figure to myself how Pauline and Henry escaped knowing that the creative mood, the keen hunger of which is more importunate than any need of food or raiment, was to be had for very little more than they spent fattening their souls on its choice products. For it is always to be bought; it is the distinction of genius as against talent, always to know in what far, unlikely market the precious commodity is to be bought. How was it that Henry escaped knowing that the appealing femininity which plays so large a part in the success of an actress with an audience of Millses, is largely the result of having been the object of that solicitious protection which it is supposed to provoke? With what, since it was agreed between Pauline and me that I was not to pay down on that counter what Cecelia and Jerry parted with cheerfully, was I ultimately to pay for it? Now that I had on all sides of me the witness of desperation, I began to be irritated at the way in which, in view of our long friendship, they accepted it for me.