Of course I knew what Judy meant by her horrible past. The escapade Victoria had told me about while she was trying to persuade me to help her put the soft pedal on Alexander Corbin’s activities in the matter of the theft of the necklace. She hadn’t, to be sure, so much told me about it, as bounded it for me. It began, I knew, in Judy’s flight from school and ended in the Martha Washington Hotel where Victoria had found her, “looking as if she hadn’t found liberty as jolly as she’d expected.” The natural inference from this last remark of Judy’s was that it was Bill Grant who had disillusioned her, who had reduced her to that cynical acquiescence in defeat which I’d found it so hard to understand in her. The appropriate thing for me to have done then, under the traditional code, would have been to tell the young man he was a yellow dog and order him out of my house. But the notion of doing anything like that was so absurd that I smiled at him. Bill misunderstood the smile. “It’s quite true, sir,” he said soberly. “He knows it’s true,” Judy remarked. “You go to sleep,” he told her gently, “and don’t listen in. I want to tell this my own way.” But it seemed he couldn’t begin. He sat there taking his pipe in short, sharp little puffs, his eyes unfocused, his thoughts astray all over the area of the past. He seemed to be exploring for a path that would take him through. “To begin with,” I said at last, to help him out, “tell me who you are.” “Well, I _am_ Bruce Applebury’s cousin,” he answered doubtfully. “I don’t mean that,” I said. “Tell him what you do,” put in Judy. “Shut up,” he ordered, “and go to sleep.” “I’m not an Applebury,” he then said to me, possessed of the thread at last. “His mother and mine are sisters. Osborne, their name was. We don’t see them much. Father, mother and I have traveled around a good deal--a little like Henry James’ family, though I don’t mean the results have been the same. Anyhow, until I went to college, my education had been a catch-as-catch-can affair, never in one school very long. Bruce, of course, did everything perfectly regularly, so I didn’t see so very much of him. And after we graduated and he went into the family bank, I saw him still less. I really know him pretty well, though, and that’s important.” I could see that it might be, but I wasn’t ready to go back to Bruce. I remembered Judy’s comment, “Tell him what you do,” so now I asked him. “Oh,” he said, embarrassed, “I try to write.” “What do you write?” I asked. “Why, I’ve tried my hand at pretty nearly everything but poetry,” he told me. “When I met Judy, down in Easton, Pennsylvania, I was traveling around on a try-out circuit, one-night stands mostly, with a play of mine, trying to lick it into shape, as they say, and hoping it would get into New York. It never did. It died out on the road. But I wasn’t there when it happened. I left it in Easton.” “Where you met Judy?” I suggested.