To Marcia he had not confided any word of his status with Mrs. Haswell, but her quick intuition told her he was deeply troubled--and her quicker sympathy responded. Sometimes Paul longed to see Loraine, but after each visit to the tiny apartment where Marcia Terroll and a girl who drew fashion illustrations had set up their household gods, the vision of his far-away Cleopatra grew a shade dimmer and a trifle more impersonal. Bit by bit he had pieced together a few sketchy fragments of Miss Terroll's biography, just enough to make the wish for fuller knowledge tantalizing. That was her maiden name, also used as a stage name, but she had been married when just out of Wellesley. She spoke little of that episode. Her girlhood was a pleasanter theme and its environment had been that of his own world--full of the gaiety and sunshine that is girlhood's inalienable right. All these scraps of personal history filtered into their conversation; rather as incidentals than as direct information. This young woman was not of the type that gratuitously relates a life-story. That she had been left resourceless with a young daughter and had fought the world unaided and unembittered, herself retaining the seeming of a child, Paul now knew, but he knew all too little to satisfy his interest. She had been secretary in a business house and an interpreter of German and Spanish. Now she was the only actress he knew--untypical and unemployed. Paul felt that in the presence of her superior mind and larger education he ought to be abashed, yet he was not, because when she laughed it was with the merriment of a gay child and when she was serious she was sweetly grave. Sometimes he played for her and sometimes she sang for him, and both did what they did so well that the critic in the other found no disappointment. Unpremeditatedly and very naturally they had struck the basis of a dependable comradeship. She saw the occasional flash of genius in his musical creativeness and his need of practical attributes. To him she was something of a mystery. To her, save for his well-kept secret of loving Loraine, he was an easily read human document. She told him of her broader experiences, always tinging them with a delicious humor in the recital, which twisted into comedy what might have been related as little tragedies, and because she had seen so much of life, where he had seen so little, she was willing to recognize his lovable qualities and overlook his weaknesses. But just as Paul did not talk much to her of his own affairs and the people of his set, so he did not talk with them of her. At first she had interested him as an experiment; then as affording the possibility for a new type of adventure in friendship, and when he came to know her in that degree which represented their present association, he ceased to ask why she interested him, and only knew that she did.