Not that she thought of him as such, or as the husband of her daughter. She was a woman whom circumstances had forced to become unscrupulous. Ever since Marise had begun, as a flapper, to show signs of unusual beauty and talent, Mums had buckled on a steely armour in which to fight the world for her girl. Naturally conventional, she had adjusted a nice balance between ambition and conscience. When she was obliged to do a thing in itself objectionable, she hastily gilded it for her own benefit as well as that of Marise, seeing it as she wished it to be. Garth in her eyes, therefore, was no more important than one of the leading men with whom Marise played her star parts; and as--like a leading man--he was to be well paid, he would have no right to obtrude upon the star's private life. She intended that, no matter how he protested, he should immediately be "called away"; and she had hoped to get just what she wanted scribbled into the notebooks of these reporters before Garth could interfere. Without feeling in the least guilty, therefore, she was upset when he had the bad taste to stalk in with Marise. "Hello, boys!" he breezily greeted the newspaper men, some of whom he had met before. They were delighted to see him, as well as Marise, and Mrs. Sorel's painstaking work went by the board in a minute. With rage and anguish she heard Garth say that when he "went West" (no longer in the sad vernacular of soldiers) his wife would go with him. "She'll be leaving the stage, you know, as soon as she can manage to get free," he explained. "And then I'm going to take her out to my adopted state, Arizona." His mother-in-law's interpolations that "it must be a long time first" were scarcely heard; and all her "exclusive information" was hurriedly blue-pencilled by the newspaper men. In the midst of this (to her) extremely painful scene, Sheridan and Belloc, author and manager, burst in like a couple of bombs. They had heard the news, and dashed to the Plaza in search of the truth. "Well, I suppose we ought to congratulate you and all that," grumbled Belloc, when his worst fears had been confirmed by the sight of Garth, well known from journalistic snapshots. "We might have suspected something was in the wind, the way you've been an every-nighter for the 'Spring Song,' Major. But safety first!--and we can't be polite till we're out of the woods. You're not going to tear Miss Sorel away from us, of course, in the midst of the run?" "Miss Sorel has ceased to exist, hasn't she?" asked Garth, with a rather glum smile. "Not ceased to exist professionally." Belloc explained his meaning to the lay mind. "And I hope she won't cease for many years."