He wallowed in this warm enchantment for ten days. Margot dismissed herself to Fayettesville on the first breath of heat. He went down to see her established in the gaping adoration of the family. He thought it hard on the Bernamer girls. He had hinted boarding school for these virgins but the Bernamers, trained by moving pictures, were wary. Yet Margot was clearly born to captivate women. He wrote to Gurdy at Lake Forest: “It was nice to see her tone herself down for your grandfather and your mother. I told her she had better not smoke except with your dad in the cowbarn. You kept telling me I must not be shocked. What is there to get shocked at? Young girls are not as prissy as they were when I was a pup.--Hell of a row coming on with the actors. We are trying to keep things quiet but it looks like a strike. But some of the men still think an actor is a cross between a mule and a hog. Letter from Olive Ilden says she is going to Japan pretty soon and will come this way. I see in the London news that Cora Boyle has signed up with the Celebrities and is coming over to be filmed as Camille or The Queen of Sheba. You are wrong about ‘Heartbreak House.’ It is a conversation, not a play. I wish Shaw would do something like Cæsar and Cleopatra again. They start work on the sets for Captain Salvador next week at the studio. Shall have two sets made for the Voodoo scene and try both on the road before we open the Walling.” Gurdy reflected that it was time to come home. Then he put it off. Lake Forest was pleasant. He was fond of his host. It was prudent to test the pull of this feeling for Margot. The thing augmented now that he couldn’t talk of her. A strict detachment from passion was silly, after all. But he was annoyed with himself as the passage of any tall and blackhaired woman across a lawn would interrupt the motion of his blood. He set his brain tasks, meditated the girl at Fayettesville, hoped that she wouldn’t singe the acute American skin of his young brothers by comments on the national arms. His sisters had probably made their own experiments with cigarettes. They were sensible lasses, anyhow, if given to endless gush about moving pictures. His young host’s sisters, amiable, blond girls were much the same thing, rarified by trips to Europe, suave frocks and some weak topics in the cerebral change. They held Dunsany a fascinating dramatist and thought there was something to be said for communism. Chicago puzzled him with its summer negligence and the candour of its wealth, with the air of stressed vice in the Loop restaurants and the sudden change from metropolis to a country town within the city limits. It seemed absurd that the listless, polished wife of a hundred million dollars should return from Long Island to give a dance in honor of a travelling English poet held lowly in Chelsea, described by Olive Ilden as a derivative angleworm. At this dance he heard of Margot from an unknown woman with whom he waltzed.