“My only consolation is that the play seems to be a good one and they have given me a part--a darling part if I do it decently. I was to have had only a maid’s part but Miss Cassell refused to go to the Coast and there wasn’t time to recast the part. “Even then I don’t think they’d have given it to me if Mr. Smull hadn’t said that he’d like me to have it. I pray humbly that I may be equal to it. Never has anything so excited me as this chance. “But if only I could have known it, and spent every second talking it over with you! I don’t mean that Mr. Donnell is not my hope and salvation; but you are _you_, Mr. Annan, and there is no other man’s mind that stimulates and enthralls mine as yours does. “Please don’t forget me. Please write to me. I know it is a very great deal to ask of such a man. But you _are_ kind, and you are famous; and I am ignorant and a nobody. Whatever you say helps. Just your voice, even your smile, acts on me like intellectual tonics--that lazy, wise, kindly, perplexing smile, so mischievously experienced, that encourages yet warns! I _wanted_ it so desperately. I needed it--and you--just when I felt that my career was beginning. Oh, Mr. Annan, please understand and please, please don’t forget me. “Eris.” In a postscript she gave her address in Los Angeles. * * * * * Much flattered and genuinely touched, he wrote her immediately. The glamour lasted for the next few weeks. Complacency is a great stimulation to memory. A bland satisfaction in the ardent mental attitude of Eris toward himself incited him to real effort in his letters. He became expansive--a trifle sentimental when he thought of the girl’s beauty--but only airily so--and he rather settled down to a Chesterfieldian attitude toward his unusual and odd little protégée. Wisdom in wads he administered with a surprising solemnity foreign to his accustomed attitude toward himself. However, his flippancy _was_ an attitude as far as it concerned his belief in himself. Because this young man really took himself very devoutly. He prescribed a course of reading for Eris. He formulated rules of conduct, exposed pitfalls, impressed maxims in epigrams, discoursed on creative and interpretive art. It was perversely clever. He used some of the material in his novel. This was all very well. The girl’s letters were charming and touching; the correspondence was excellent practice for him, and part of it could be salvaged for practical ends. But there were in use at that time, among the semi-educated, two cant-words which the public, now, was working to rags;--_psychology_ and _complex_. And it was these words that suggested to Annan that his letters to Eris might, more profitably to himself, become experiments in research and vivisection.