I believe I felt myself rather of a better stripe, to find it so in the domestic proceeding, though I do not really know that my necessity was any whit superior to Miss Filette's, except in offering the minimum possibility of making anybody unhappy by it. But because I knew my friends would think it ridiculous that I could lay hold of power again by so inconsiderable a handle as Leon Griffin, I suffered a corroding resentment. Griffin was getting up a new act for himself, and evenings as I helped him with it, I felt a faint stirring of creative power. When he had finished, I would take the shade off the lamp and render scenes for him from my favourite Elizabethan drama; and in the face of his unqualified admiration for me, I could almost act. Toward the end of the week as the cold abated, Mr. Griffin asked me to see a play in which some of his friends were playing; and Jerry being prodigal of favours, I responded with an invitation to "The Futurist." I hadn't mentioned Griff to Sarah, I never more than mentioned him to any of my friends, but I saw no reason why I should not speak of them to him, especially when they were so much upon the public tongue as Sarah was just then. "Croyden?" he said; "isn't that an unusual name?" He appeared to be puzzling over it. "I seem to remember a town somewhere by that name." "In New York," I told him. I was on the point of telling him how Sarah came by it, but an impulse of discretion saved me. I had seen "The Futurist" so many times now, that, once at the theatre, I occupied myself with looking at the audience and took no sort of notice of my escort until after Sarah's entrance near the close of the first act. "Well?" I laid myself open to compliments for my friend. I was startled by what I saw when I looked at him. He had shrunk away into the corner of his seat farthest from me, like a man whose garment had fallen from him unawares. The stark naked soul of him fed visibly upon her bodily perfection; Sarah's beauty took men like that sometimes when they were able to see it--there were those who thought her merely nice-looking. I could see his tongue moving about stealthily to wet his dry lips. I couldn't bear to look at him like that; it seemed a pitiful thing for a man to ache so with the beauty of a woman he had long ceased to deserve; it was as though he had laid bare some secret ache in me. Coming out of the theatre he surprised me with a knowledge of Sarah's affairs. He knew that she had begun with O'Farrell. "I played with him myself," he admitted; "that was before Miss--Miss----" "Croyden," I supplied; "that was the town she came from; I shouldn't have told you except that you seem to know." "I was expecting another name. Wasn't she--wasn't she married once? A fellow by the name of Lawrence." "Oh, well, you may call it married. He was a cur."