Abed long after midnight, visions besieged her bewilderingly: a length of dusty golden highway walled by green forest, with a white bridge glaring in sunlight at the bottom of a hill; the affrighting onrush of great motor-cars meeting their own, and the din and dust of their passage; the bright harbour of Huntington, blue and gold in a frame of gold and green, viewed from the marble balustrade of the Château des Beaux Arts; the wrinkled, kindly, comprehending face of a waiter who served them at dinner; the look in her lover's eyes as she repeated, on demand, guarded avowals under cover of the motor's rumble; the ardent face of a boy who had seemed unable to cease staring at her in the restaurant; silver and purple of the road by night; wheeling ranks of lights dotting the desolation of suburban Brooklyn; the high-flung span of Queensboro' Bridge, a web of steel and concrete strung with opalescent globes; the glare of the city's painted sky; the endless pulsing of the motor; their last caress on parting at the foot of the stairs.... On the morrow she went back to her typewriter like Cinderella to her kitchen. But what work Matthias was able to invent for her was neither arduous nor urgent; she was able to take her time on it, and wasted many an hour in dreaming. Her mind was, indeed, more engaged with thoughts of new frocks than with the circumstances of her love or her services to her lover. She was to receive thenceforward twenty-five instead of ten dollars a week. Matthias had experienced little difficulty in over-ruling her faint protestations: they were to be together a great deal, he argued, and she must be able to dress at least neatly; moreover, by requiring her promise to marry him at some future time when his fortunes would permit, he had in a measure made her dependent upon him; she couldn't reasonably be asked to wait for long on a bare pittance. His arguments were reinforced by one he knew nothing of, a maxim culled from the wisdom of Miss Maizie Dean: _It was up to a girl to look out for herself first, last, and all the time_. The platitude had made an ineffaceable impression upon Joan's sense of self-preservation. And if Matthias were able to afford nightly dinners for two at good restaurants, in addition to theater tickets several times a week, he ought to be able to afford a decent compensation to his stenographer; especially when it was his wish that she refrain from attempting to earn more money on the stage. It was, however, true that no offer had come to Joan of other theatrical work, and that the issue of her ambition remained in abeyance, a subject which she didn't care to raise and which Matthias, since that first night, had considered settled.