Star-Dust Part 65

"Well?"

He uncrossed his knees, straightening.

"Well?"

"Strong."

"Then it did grip you?"

"Yes, but I can see why it gathered dust as it went the rounds. From the average commercial manager's point of view there is a question about that seamy kind of thing getting over with the playgoer. He wants to be entertained, not harrowed. That's pretty raw stuff. Except for the little woman and the poor delinquent youngster, it is an out-and-out--what shall I say?--an out-and-out crook play, to coin a phrase."

"Exactly. It is a section of life about which your average playgoer knows little or nothing and yet one for which he nourishes a tremendous curiosity."

"It's crude--"

"I know, but the idea is bigger than the writing is crude. If I had the money I would take a chance on producing it to-morrow. It has social and sociological value, and at the same time is corking-good entertainment.

I read the police-inspector scene to my little girl just to see what she would get out of it. 'Why,' she cried, 'a man would confess to anything with that white light on him and those big policemen's eyes on him.

That's not fair! That shouldn't be allowed. Isn't there a way to stop it?' That from a thirteen-year-old! It's one of those man-made abuses that if we women ever get the vote we'll go after! Don't answer me on this play now, Mr. Visigoth. Take it to your hotel. Read it over again.

Talk it over with your brother when he comes next week. How's that? No snap judgment."

"Good. The play is on the docket for the evening. Now let us get the taste of the underworld out of our mouths. How would the Claremont appeal now?"

"I'd rather not."

"Well, I suppose that amounts to my _conge?_"

She smiled with her brows arched.

"It is after eleven."

He was incessantly feeling for his cigarette case and then with a certain unease refraining.

"You may," she said, "one, before you go."

He held the case to her. She took one gingerly, accepting the light more gingerly.

"I don't like them," she said, exhaling with the violence of the unaccustomed.

"Then whyfore?"

"Because it is a stupid convention which says that a man may and a woman may not. Why should it be a matter of course for you and, in most cases, a matter of comment and even vulgarity for me?"

"Usage."

"Usage isn't a reason. It's Time's trick for applying the brake to progress."

He lit up gratefully, waving out the match and hesitating for a spot to dispose of it. She reached across the table, palm up. "Give me."

He caught her hand.

"Lilly!"

She jerked back with a little clicky catch of breath.

"Don't."

"Lilly, you're maddening! Lilly, can't you see what I haven't the words to tell you? For years--since that night at the Waldorf--I--I have been living for this moment. I realized it to-night as you read that play.

Lilly, is what is between us insurmountable?"

She jerked back her head, her irises at their trick of growing.

"You don't know what you are saying!"

"I do know what I am saying. I know that you are the most delectable woman in the world--and for me."

She held out his hat and cane.

"My little girl is asleep. Hadn't you better go?"

"That's not fair," he said, taking the hat and cane, but flus.h.i.+ng up furiously.

"I know it isn't. But what is there I can say to you?"

"You can talk it out. Man to man."

"Sit down," she said, clasping her hands and regarding him through swimming and revealing eyes.

"Now--what is there to say--Bruce--between you and me?"

"Where is he?"

"You know."

"Are matters unchanged?"

She nodded.

"I love you, Lilly."

"And I have a husband and a thirteen-year-old child, making of the triangle a rectangle."

"You have held me off on that dagger point now for ten years. Good G.o.d!

women don't martyrize themselves to a past these days. What are you doing with your life? Sacrificing it on the altar of the old burned-out husk of a marriage? Canonizing a mistake!"

"It is the one thing I am able to do for him in some little reparation!"

"Mock heroics."

"No, it is more than mock heroic to save him that precious shred of his respectability. That is about all I have left him to cherish. There are some human beings you simply cannot conceive of in certain situations.