The whole army of the studio stood meanwhile at ease, drawing salary and waiting for Ferriday to remember his day's program and give the order to go ahead. But he was busy with his new story, in the throes of nympholepsy, seeing visions, hearing voices. Kedzie sat in a marble expectancy, Galatea watching Pygmalion create her and prepare to bring her to life. She had never lived. She realized that. All her previous existence had been but blind gropings in the womb of time. The backers came to remind Ferriday that there was waiting a costly mob of actors, wooed from the speaking drama by trebled salaries. Ferriday howled to them to get out. They did not respect his inspirations; they suspected his motives toward Kedzie. But Ferriday was deep in love with his art; he was panting with the afflation of Apollo. Old motives, old scenes, old characters that had served as “sure-fire stuff” since the earliest Hindu drama now fell into their ancient places and he thought them new. Kedzie was sure she had never heard such original ideas. Her gratitude to Ferriday was absolute. And he was clever enough, or crazy enough, to say that he was grateful to her. He had been looking for just Her, and she had come to him just in time. He made her promises that Solomon could not have made to Sheba, or Shakespeare to the dark lady. Solomon could offer to his visitor Ophirian wealth, and Shakespeare could guarantee with some show of success (up to date) that his words of praise would outlive all other monuments. But Ferriday did not offer Kedzie minerals or adjectives. He cried: “Little girl, I'll put you on a girdle of films that will encircle the world. Your smile will run round the globe like the sun, and light up dark places in Africa. Your tears will shower the earth. People in thousands of towns will watch your least gesture with anxiety. Queens will have you brought to their palaces to make them laugh and cry. The soldiers of the world will call you their mascot and write love-letters to you from the trenches. I will have a billion pictures made of you, and you shall breathe and move in all of them. You shall live a million lives at once. I will have your other self placed in museums so that centuries from now they can take you out and bring you to life again.” It was a mighty good speech. It would be hard to find a serenade to beat it. And he read it superbly. He had sung it to every one of his only girls in the world, his eternal (pro tem.) passions. He had had about nineteen muses already. Kedzie did not know this, of course. And it would not have mattered much. Better the nine-and-ninetieth muse to such a man than the first and final gas-stove slave of a Tommie Gilfoyle. Kedzie sat in the state of nerves of a little girl alone on a mountain-top with lightning shimmering and striking all round her. She was so happy, so full of electrical sparks, that she was fairly incandescent. As she said afterward, she felt “all lit up.”