For long hours she sat in the coolness of that stage-box and held her breath while she threw her whole self into the building of the play, which so fascinatingly was and was not hers. And through all those hours, close at her side, between her and the big dim theater, sat Mr. Godfrey Vandeford, with his arm across the back of her chair and his eager face close to hers and tilted at the same angle. Her slightest murmur or his lowest whisper caught and was answered, and they almost seemed to be breathing one breath, so absorbed were they in the destiny of their mutual adventure. Like all women of her kind, Patricia Adair had known men only through a cloud, which sex traditions had firmly held between her and them, and Godfrey Vandeford was the first man she had encountered since she had slipped outside of its deadening density into a world where men and women endeavored together first, and left their sentinel undertakings to a fitting secondary time and place. In all sincerity she accepted him as a co-worker and was as happy working with him as it was possible for a woman to be. She specially liked being beside him in the office, and watched him settle the details of the running the big machine smoothly, from the hiring of the property-man to the firing of three successive stage-carpenters. "Real eats, Mr. Vandeford?" the former had inquired one morning. "Brown-bread turkey, nice and tasty, good crackers, but soda-pop and so forth for booze. Remember, they've got to face it, we hope, many weeks; don't turn their stomachs so they'll all gag." "I see, sir, I see. I fed 'Maple Leaves' for two years, and they all et every night and gimme a purse when it closed to go to London." "Goes!" "Brown-bread turkey sounds nice. I'm hungry," said Miss Adair, as the good-providing property-man departed.