Intensely gratified, the girl went back to bed and promptly fell asleep formulating ingenious schemes to meet Marbridge by ostensible accident. On the following day she lunched at the hotel, spent two fruitless hours in its public corridors between tea time and time to dress for dinner, and another in Peacock Alley after dinner, seeing nothing whatever of Marbridge. And the day after provided her with a fatiguing repetition of this experience. She began to be tremendously bored by this mode of existence, to sense the emptiness, the vapidity of hotel life for a friendless woman. Once or twice she revived and let her fancy play about her project to revisit her family in the guise of Lady Bountiful, but only to defer its execution against the time when she could go to them with another engagement to drive home the stupendous proportions of her success. Besides (she told herself) they seemed to be worrying along without her, all right. If they cared anything about her, they could have written, at least; Edna had the West Forty-sixth Street address.... Not once or twice but many a time and oft she found herself yearning back to the homely society of the Sisters Dean's salon in the establishment of Madame Duprat. And though she held back from revisiting the house through fear of meeting Matthias, she wasted many an hour promenading Broadway from Thirty-eighth Street north to Forty-eighth, in the hope of encountering Maizie or May or one of their friends. But it was singularly her fate to espy not one familiar face among the multitude her wistful eyes reviewed during those dreary mid-afternoon patrols. Everybody she knew, it would seem, was either busy or resting out of town. On her fourth morning at the Waldorf, reading _The Morning Telegraph_ over the breakfast tray in her room, Joan ran across an illuminating news item that carried a Buffalo date line. It chronicled the first performance of Arlington's most recent venture, "Mrs. Mixer," announced as a satirical comedy of manners by an author unknown either to Joan or to fame, and projected by Arlington as a vehicle to exploit the putative talents of Nella Cardrow, "the stage's latest recruit from the Four Hundred." The Buffalo performance was, it appeared, the first of a fortnight's trial on the road, following which the production was to be withdrawn pending a metropolitan début in the Autumn. The story of the first night was infused with a thinly sarcastic humour.