Mark wearily tore Cora Boyle’s card in his tanned fingers and nodded. The stranger was right. This new theatre was stale. The gold sparkled stupidly. The shades of velvet were afflicting. But Carlson liked it. Mark sighed and thought, rather sadly, that his patron’s whole concept of the trade was vulgar and outworn like this gaudy expense. Red velvet, heavy gold, bright lamps--the trappings of his apprenticeship. Old actors told Mark that this was a variant of the first Daly theatre. The stranger was right, then. Mark wondered and went upstairs to the office but the flushed man was gone. “That feller Huneker was in tryin’ to get me to hire some orchestra leader,” Carlson said. “But I thought Huneker was a young man,” Mark answered. Mr. Fitch whispered from his corner, “He hasn’t any particular age. What was that riot downstairs, Mark?” “Anna Held dropped in and left some flowers. She ain’t lookin’ well.” The playwright closed his magazine and lifted himself from the chair, assuming his strange furry hat. “We have just so much vitality. She’s losing hers. But if she died tomorrow it would make almost as much noise as killing a president. And that’s quite right. Presidents never make any one feel sinful. Good night.” Carlson asked, “You’re comin’ tonight, Clyde.” “Not feeling right, thanks.” Mark followed the bent back down the stairs. Fitch was stopped by a lounger at the doors, loaned the old fellow ten dollars and passed, unobtrusive, along Forty Fifth Street. He went shadowlike in his vivid dress. Liking the man, Mark frowned. The exhausted courtesy, the slow voice always left him puzzled; it was as though the playwright’s prosperity kept within it a dead core of something pained, as if the ghost of an old hunger somehow lived on under the coloured superfluity. Mark’s motor arrived outside. He went to whistle Gurdy up from an investigation of the orchestra pit. All the bulbs burned about the house. For a second Mark liked the place then the gilt and the mulberry hangings bothered him. He chased Gurdy up an aisle to the vestibule. The treasurer slipped from the box office to say, “Young Rand just called up. I said you wasn’t here.” “Who?” “Cora Boyle’s new husband. That English kid.”