“Any one of a number of things,” Brainard replied cheerfully. While Melody negligently turned over the pages of his elaborate report, he continued musingly: “It was just six years ago this month when my play was turned down—the last one I ever wrote. I walked back up the avenue with the manuscript in my pocket, feeling that the bottom of the world had dropped out. I was a forlorn, broken specimen. It was a day something like this, too.” He glanced at the lowering April sky. “It is very different now. I’m not much richer than I was then, but I am a totally different being. In fact, I think now I could call myself a man!” “I think so,” Melody agreed, in a rather doleful voice. “And a man can always face the world with a light heart, no matter how light his pockets happen to be.” Melody nodded sympathetically, and murmured,—“for the great adventure!” “Yes! Life is the great adventure!” After a long silence, Melody looked up into Brainard’s face and stretched out her hands to him. “Won’t you take me—with you—on the great adventure?” Brainard grasped her hands, and, leaning forward, tried to read the full purpose in the gray eyes. “Melody!” “Must I ask twice?” she said, blushing. “It’s more than most women have the nerve to do once. You see, after you left that night, I guessed—and—” As Brainard took her in his arms she threw back her head, and, holding him away, said: “And you’ll have to take the Melody mine along with Melody. I said I’d make you keep the old thing!” XIX “And what shall we do with the theater?” Brainard asked, in a lucid interval, early in June. “Shall we sell it to Einstein & Flukeheimer for vaudeville? Or shall we keep it for a certain American actress when she wearies of matrimony? Or shall we try to put new life into the great Idea, and keep on giving the dear Public what bores it, because it’s good for the dear Public to be bored?” “I never thought much of your great Idea,” Melody confessed candidly. “The trouble with it is that it doesn’t do any good to give people what they aren’t willing to work for. You’ve got to earn your bread, so to speak, in order to digest it properly. The Public’s got to want good plays and good acting enough to pay the proper price for ’em. You can’t get people interested in an art they don’t understand and don’t want enough to work for. Let ’em give themselves the best they can understand and like until they kick for better!” “That even I have begun to comprehend, O Minerva and Melody in one! Still, there are exceptions to your philosophical principle—for example, yourself, goddess, and me, who digest with an excellent appetite our heaven-sent cake.” “Didn’t you earn it—and me? As few men ever earned the love they take! And I reckon I earned you, too.” There followed an unlucid interval.