“The plot! I’m the plot. You may smile, but I am.--I am the plot of _October_--isn’t that so, Horace?” “Oh, yes, Miss Audrey is the plot,” the playwright said gravely. “I have nothing to do with it, except to draw my royalties.” He picked up the thread of his conversation with Desire. A puzzled look crept into Fluffy’s clear child’s eyes--a wounding suspicion that she was being mocked. She put it from her as incredible. “When I say I’m the plot, I mean I gave him the story. I told it to him in a punt at Pangbourne this summer. It’s about a woman called October, who’s come to the October of her beauty, but has spring hidden in her heart. She’d loved a man excessively once, when she was young and generous; and he hadn’t valued her love. After that she determined to wear armor, to keep her dreams locked away in her heart and to leave it to the men to do the loving. She becomes an actress, like me. Almost autobiography! At last, when she realizes that her popularity depends on her beauty and she hears the feet of the younger generation climbing after her--at last he comes, the one wearing a smoke-blue corded velvet, trimmed with gray-squirrel fur at the sleeves and collar. Her hat was the gray breast of a bird and sat at a slant across her forehead. There was a flush of color in her cheeks. Again the beauty-patch had wandered; it was on the left of her chin now. As he watched, he felt the lack of something; then he knew what it was. “Why, what’s happened to your curl?” She put her hand up to her neck and opened her eyes widely. “H’I sye, old sort, yer don’t mean ter tell me as I’ve lost it?” While he was laughing at this sudden change of personality, she commenced searching her vanity-case with sham feverishness; to his amazement she drew out the missing decoration. “Oh, ’ere it is. You’re learnin’ h’all me secrets, dearie. It ain’t wise. But, Lawd, ‘cause yer likes it and ter show yer ‘ow glad I am ter be wiv yer----” She deliberately pinned it into place behind her ear; it hung there trembling, looking entirely natural. Dropping her Cockney characterization, she bowed to him with bewitching archness: “Do I look like Nell Gywnn now? I expect, if she were here for an inquisitive person like you to ask, she’d tell you that hers were false.” He loved her for her honesty; if any one had told him a month ago that so slight and foolish an action could have made him love her better, he would have laughed them to scorn. It was intoxicating--transforming. It was as though these stone-palaces of Fifth Avenue fell back, disclosing magic woodlands--woodlands such as his father painted through whose shadows pale figures glided. People on the pavement were lovers, going to meetings which memory would make sacred. Like Arcady springing out to meet him, the Park swam into sight, tree-tufted, lagooned, embowered, canopied with the peacock-blue and saffron of the sunset.