Hortense Quinby’s visit left her with a headache and no zest for her supper. The opera that night was to be “The Magic Flute,” and Thurley was at her best as _Pamina_. She loved the rôle and rehearsals had proceeded in excellent fashion. But the interview with Hortense had given her a fearful sense as to her own future. Would she, in turn, become furtive, restless, eager to seize upon some other new and lovely creature, with a sort of vampirish desire to have youth by feeding on youth? She went to her room without ringing for her maid and slipped out of her brilliant afternoon frock. She rummaged in her clothes room crowded with new gorgeousness until she found a rough tweed suit and a boyish hat. Taking a swagger stick and whistling for Taffy, she wilfully disappeared out of the apartment at just the hour her schedule called for rest, facial massage and toasted wafers with hot milk! It was rainy, and the air was unnaturally warm, the wind having died down. Her throat doctor would have come after her in an ambulance had he known she was sauntering along the river drive, pausing to look at the blinking lights on the boats or at the dark, beautiful uncertainty of what lay on the other shore. Was she beginning to have nerves? Thurley spoke sharply to Tally, warning him to heel her or she would disown him. Nerves! She who had never in her life been prey to so much as a headache, who had laughed at throat washes and precaution against eye strain, who audaciously cracked nuts with her firm, white teeth and declared she did not know how it would feel to be even a trifle indisposed! Not the strain of training nor the début, the unnatural life of the opera stage nor the atmosphere of crowds and tired, jaded artists who knew, too well, how it felt to be muchly indisposed had made such inroads on her Viking-like constitution as this queer woman who bounded in on her coquettish serenity and fairly startled a yes out of her. Thurley felt trip-hammer pulses beating in her forehead. She wanted to wander on and on until the dark became permanent and the traffic scarce and she was dog-tired as she used to be when she was at the end of one of her tramps with Dan and they sat under a tree to get rested up, kissing each other a shocking number of times ... strange this woman should so affect her.