“She wouldn’t!” Brainard exclaimed with a laugh. “Louisiana is a genius. Don’t tell her what’s going to happen over here. Let her have her little dance out as long as it is possible. Her hard times, poor child, will begin soon enough!” “She writes that Cissie Pyce is over there. Remember Cissie—our first experiment as emotional lady?” “She wept all over this carpet when I fired her—_do_ I remember?” “Louisiana says that Cissie has been taken up by Bantam, and is coming back to the States to play in _The Star of the Seven Seas_.” “We’ll make somebody’s fortune yet,” Brainard commented, “by discharging ’em, if in no other way. But Louisiana was really our first and only find—the one personality that we might have developed and produced.” “And she found us!” the secretary corrected. “Let’s see what it has cost all told.” He ran over on his fingers the different large items of expense that the great Idea had involved: “The theater building eight hundred, the first year in New York two hundred, Chicago . . . one million six hundred thousand odd for Louisiana!” Brainard concluded whimsically. “And she’s not yet launched. Our kind of art comes high, Ned!” “You’re a tip-top loser,” the young man said admiringly. “Don’t you ever think what it will mean to you, if Lorilla should win her suit?” Brainard stretched himself leisurely. “Except for being licked in this theater business—and I don’t like being beaten any better than the next man—I should howl for joy when they produce the fictitious widow and the orphan son in court. It would set me free for another great adventure. That’s what Herbert Krutzmacht and Melody have done for one Edgar Brainard!” In his eyes was the azure glitter of the sky above the stern Arizona mountains. For it was, indeed, a glorious world of venture for him whose soul was keyed to the right pitch. XIV Nevertheless, Brainard felt depressed as the time drew near when the doors of his theater would have to close, the windows be boarded up. Even should he win the case against the fraudulent claimants of the Melody, the great Idea could never be wholly perfected in all the splendid details that he had dreamed. No one man, were he Croesus incarnate, could create a national art. He had learned that. . . .