“Yes,” he admitted. “But not because I’d met her. I’d already made up my mind to quit when that happened. I’d come to hate the thing so that it made me sick. Every change they made in it made it worse, until I hoped it would die on the road. If it had ever got in New York, I’d have run like a rabbit.” “Anyhow you _did_ meet Judy,” I persisted. “How did it happen?” Once more his face was shiny with sweat, and he mopped it with his handkerchief. “Oh, it sounds rotten,” he said miserably. “You’ll think I ought to be kicked, and I wouldn’t deny it. But then, you know Judy. You _do_ know her, don’t you?” he shot at me fiercely. “Yes, I know her,” I said. “Go on.” “She was a waitress in the hotel,” he resumed. “One of these coffee-shop places, you know, where half the town comes for lunch. I talked to her over a meal or two. She’d been to see my play. One night I overtook her on the street, and instead of going to that damned theater, I went for a long walk with her. “Of course I’d known from the first word she spoke to me that she wasn’t an ordinary waitress.... Well--naturally. But I couldn’t make her out at all. She wouldn’t tell me anything about herself. She gave me a name to call her by, but she told me while we were on that walk that it wasn’t hers. “By way of playing the game I didn’t tell her anything about myself, either. She knew my name, of course, but I let her think it was a _nom de plume_. It was Osborne Grant on the programs, and I told her to call me Bill. It got to be a sort of understanding that we took each other as is, without explanations. “You can’t imagine what it was like. Well, perhaps you can, but I’d never imagined that anything like that could happen. It was the only really romantic thing that ever had happened to me. And it was like that from the very first moment. “On that walk we took I told her I was going to quit the play. I said I was so deadly sick of it that I couldn’t go on with it. I said I was going to buy a Ford and go somewhere, disappear for a while--get lost. “It’s hard to be sure you’re being honest telling about a thing like that. I suppose I must have had it in the back of my head as an awfully jolly possibility that she’d come with me. We talked about it at first as a joke, and then she said to me suddenly, ‘Are you really joking? Because if you aren’t, I’ll come.’ She said she was on a sort of tramp, anyhow. She meant to work her way west, clear to the Pacific coast perhaps.” He broke off and looked at her. She was sound asleep now, and no mistake. He went to the couch and drew a light blanket over her. “She’s had a rotten two days,” he said, as he stood looking down at her. Then he went back to his chair.