"'You two listen to the father of what you are to be,'" Selma Cross went on, roughening her voice and tightening her nasal passages, to imitate the old Hebrew star-maker. "'Listen to the soulless Vhruebert, who brudalizes the great Amerigan stage. You two are Art. Very well, listen to Commerce. It took me twenty-five years to learn that there must be humor in a blay. This _T'ing_ would not lift the lip of a ganary-bird. It took me twenty-five years to learn there must be joy at the end of a blay--and wedding-bells. This _T'ing_ ends just about--over the hills to the mad-house. Twenty-five years proved to me what I know the first day--that women of the stage must be beautiful. Miss Gross is not. I say no more. Here I have neither dramatist nor star. I could give the blay by Gabot to Ellen Terry--or to Miss Gross, if Ibsen write it. As it is, I have no name. There are five thousand people in this country writing blays with humor and habby endings. There are ten thousand beautiful women exbiring to spend it on the stage. Yet you two are the chosen of Vhruebert. When you look into each other's eye and visper how von-der-ful you are, with rising inflection; and say, "To hell with Gommerce and the Binhead Bublic!" remember Vhruebert who advances the money!'" "And did you remember Vhruebert in that fairy luncheon together?" Paula asked happily. "No, I only saw the long white face of Stephen Cabot. I wanted to take him in my arms and make him whole!" For ten weeks Bellingham lay in one of the New York hospitals. "A woman attends him," Madame Nestor informed. "She is young and has been very beautiful. How well do I know her look of impotence and apathy--that look of unresisting obedience." To Paula, the magician seemed back among the dead ages, although Madame Nestor did not regard the present lull without foreboding. Paula could not feel that her real self had been defiled. The dreadful visitations were all but erased, as pass the spectres of delirium. What was more real, and rocked the centres of her being, was the conception of this outcast's battle for life. She could not forget that it was in pursuing her, that he had been injured. Facing not only death, but extinction, this idolater of life had, as one physician expressed it, held together his shattered vitality by sheer force of will, until healing set in. The only thought comparable in terror to such a conflict, had to do with the solitudes and abject frigidity of inter-stellar spaces.