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between them. Mrs. Hartsfield leaned back in the shadowy depths of a highbacked chair, much too slight and quiet ever to seem insistent, and Mr. Trossett was watching her, she knew, with appreciation. It was an opportune

moment.

In answer to her question he only gasped slightly and then said, 'I hope some day to be able to talk to you about it.'

That admission contented Mrs. Hartsfield for the moment, but when it was shared with others they were not so willing to respect his reticence. They wanted to know more. Their chosen emissary was Barry Whelan, because Whelan was the only man ever known to visit Trossett in his home.

Whelan was of such stern stuff that he felt no shame whatever in going directly to the small apartment where Trossett hid himself and spending two hours in aimless conversation hoping to find a cue for mentioning the play. Whelan's admiration for his friend was tremendously hearty; he was sure that if Trossett ever did write a play it would be a thing of the airiest perfection. While he was floundering about in his good-humored way, trying to stumble on the key to confidences, he noticed an unfamiliar picture on the mantelshelf of the little sitting-room. The room was so simple and austere, in spite of a shy untidiness, that any change struck even a careless eye. There had never been anything on the mantelshelf before but two blue-willow plates, a needlework sampler in a frame, and a German beer-stein on whose pewter top a fat monk caressed his jaw with fixed, incongruous mirth. Now there was a sketch, a pencil drawing of a lovely girl, leaning against the beer-stein. It was no more than half finished and looked as if the artist might have put it down when interrupted, but the eyes

VOL. 137 - NO. 1

and the sweet line of the lips were already evoked in delicate touches.

'I did n't know that you drew,' said Whelan, supposing naturally that the sketch was by somebody else. He was surprised when Trossett acknowledged authorship.

His host blushed and smoothed the top of his high forehead with a small white hand. 'I don't, really,' he answered. I just happened to be inspired to draw a picture of Mary.'

Whelan raised compelling eyebrows at him and asked, 'Who is Mary?'

Trossett blushed again. 'Mary Trevena,' he replied. 'She's the heroine of a- of a sort of play I've been trying to write.'

His visitor did not give the drawing another glance. He turned and said with great satisfaction, 'I've always thought you ought to write a play, Trossett. It's just your sort of thing. I'll bet it will be the cleverest little comedy that Broadway has had a chance at in years. Your gift for dialogue has always been the admiration of your friends.'

'But it is n't to be that sort of thing at all.' The playwright looked alarmed. 'It is n't going to be clever, you know. It is quite serious and rather foolishly romantic.'

He rose and turned the sketch of Mary Trevena to the wall.

'Even so,' Whelan persisted, 'it will surprise Broadway

'I don't believe that Broadway will ever be bothered with it,' said Trossett, firmly. 'I'm not writing it for production.'

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vaguely toward the back of the sketch tips of his fingers together and admired on the shelf.

Whelan laughed at this poetic notion. "The real author comes out in you at once. You are thinking already of your heroine as a living person. That's splendid!' He rubbed his hands and beamed. 'But I don't believe you will be so obstinately stingy when the time comes. Why how can your heroine, your "Mary Trevena," ever have any life at all unless you make her known to people? She has some rights, you know. She has a right to be admired and applauded.' But he did not continue the argument then. He took it for granted that Trossett would be willing to share his charming heroine with the world as soon as she could be perfected.

He rushed away to tell Mrs. Hartsfield immediately his confirmation of the great news and to comment with her on Trossett's characteristic whim.

The playwright was left alone. He was used to being alone. That little sitting-room had been his donjon of retirement for ten or twelve years, ever since he had come to New York and found a habitable corner in West Twelfth Street. Except for Whelan, no friend ever saw its shabby interior. And Whelan was not the man to guess that 'Mary Trevena' had been a visitor to its loneliness for a long time.

She came first to admire the bluewillow plates. They were a present from Trossett's great-aunt, Mrs. Moseby-Smith, who distributed, just before her death, the treasures of her collection. He received, without previous announcement, a box filled with excelsior, and in its crisp heart were the two willow plates. Their rich, blue, ancient shine was a thrilling pleasure as he took them carefully from their wrappings and set them upright on the white-marble shelf above his fireplace. He sat in his deepest chair and put the

them through half-closed eyes. They were quite perfect.

He smiled when he saw how crassly masculine and ugly they made the old beer-stein which had preëmpted a place on the shelf long before. And in thinking of that incongruity he felt a slight wave of shame. Mr. Trossett hated being effeminate; he bit his tongue on the expression of effeminate opinions. He had cultivated a half-hearted way of slapping his knee to punctuate a laugh, a gesture which was mildly absurd and only served to call attention to his natural quietness. Now he was shamed in his delight over the soft brilliance of the willow plates because it occurred to him that no man had a right to feel so much emotion over two pieces of old china. But he had a courageous æsthetic honesty. Whether it was effeminate to admire them or not, they deserved admiration, and he fell to imagining how much pleasure they could give to a woman inhabitant of that room, if there had been one.

It was in the evening when that fancy struck him. He had turned the straight shaft of light from a table lamp along the glowing blue of the plates, leaving the rest of the room in dusk. Across the fireplace from him was another chair, deep and hospitable like his own. Its high back had two curved side-pieces in whose corners a head might rest and be almost hidden. As the lady first began to take shape in the dark recesses of that chair, she was much like Mrs. Hartsfield. Certainly Mrs. Hartsfield was the most charming woman he knew, the most sympathetic, the most cultivated, possibly the most intelligent. And she had in physical presence a gently poised serenity, soothing and encouraging at the same time. But he checked the involuntary effort of his imagination to put Mrs. Hartsfield in that chair so that she

could admire the blue plates. She belonged, with the brutality of fact, to that crass fool, her husband. In his own sitting-room at least, Trossett insisted upon being himself and having a lady of his own.

So he fixed his gaze on the shadowed cushions of the empty chair and labored to convince himself that his own special lady was sitting there, breathing soft admiration of the blue china. The materialization was not complete in his first attempt. He could supply the ghost of his fancy with effective, ladylike phrases of delight. He spoke one of these comments aloud involuntarily and startled himself with the sound of his own voice in the dusky, empty room where no ghost had ever been before. But he found that a too eager scrutiny of the shadows drove away the image which seemed to be gathering out of impalpable atmosphere. He kept courteously distant in his contemplation, and the suggestion of a gracious presence remained with him all that evening.

Inevitably he renewed the experiment. When he entered his sittingroom the next evening, he glanced at the great chair as if to inquire if the lady might be there ahead of him. He looked reproachfully at the blue china because it had not done its duty in evocation. Settled in his own place, he stirred the fire and then looked quickly over his shoulder to surprise her. He laughed aloud at his own silliness, but there was a catch in his breath when he saw, he was sure he saw, the fold of a pale-green silk garment on the chair. He knew, although the thought had never shaped itself in his mind, that she would be fond of wearing pale-green silk. It would go with her wraithlike slenderness and the coil of redbrown hair she would bind like a coronet over her brows. He shrank into his own place and looked across with

the most circumspect gentleness. He was rewarded with the white glimmer of her face, framed in her hair and turned toward the fire.

Trossett was a very sane man in spite of his playful, timid spite and his capacity for emotion over such things as blue-china plates. He knew how completely imaginary was the personality he was creating; he never once tried to deceive himself about reality. She was a fancy. But as fancy she took on, night by night, new color and warmth and surprising variety. He very seldom tried to see her. That was too evidently a dangerous exercise, but he could none the less feel her presence. She conquered for him the shame of effeminacy. He began to rearrange his decorations, few and shabby, his prints, his books, in accord with the feminine taste he had been afraid to avow in action even in retirement. He considered casting out the ugly German beer-stein, with its fat-jowled pewter monk, but gave it thumbs up at last because this was to be, after all, an apartment for two people, not just for the woman alone. It was the apartment of a man and a woman together, a home. His exquisite sensibility was amused with the thought of making a room such as could be described as 'a man's home refined by the touch of a woman.' Since nobody but his charwoman and Barry Whelan ever entered there, and both those honest, slightly obtuse friends were incapable of noting subtle changes, he kept the presence of the lady a secret for many months.

However, a lady who never spoke could not be permanently satisfactory. He wrote out a little dialogue one evening, between himself and her, in which all the wittiest things were resolutely ascribed to the lady. To himself, in his rôle of masculine personality, was given all the heaviness on which the lady exercised her wit. He invented a name

for her, first 'Mary' and then, since 'Mrs. Trossett' struck him as only absurd but altogether unromantic, he added an independent surname. 'Mary Trevena.' The surname was one he had read in a novel. The initials 'M. T.' were put in his spidery script at the beginning of her speeches. A sheet of note paper with four exchanges of this imaginary talk 'M. T.' says, and 'M.' (meaning, the Man) repliesfell from his pocket one day in Mrs. Hartsfield's drawing-room. It was that unlucky but typical accident which loosed the gossips in their hunt after his play.

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Whelan's discovery of the sketch of Mary drove him into further avowals. The half-mythical play served to disguise the fact which he dared not confess.

But as the dialogue between the Man and Mary Trevena grew, on page after page of fine tracings, the Man, rather heavy perhaps in all but his appreciation of Mary, tried constantly to push things to some sort of conclusion. He was stupidly human; he insisted on making personal application of charmingly impersonal remarks; he indulged in broad compliments; he protested devotion and hinted in a gentlemanly way at desire. He was unmanageable. Mr. Trossett began to see at last that he would not be able to keep the affair suspended between them forever. There would have to be a real play with intrigue and entanglement and finally some sort of dénouement.

In a careless moment he was reading the column of a pert dramatic reporter and he paused on the hideous phrase 'a kiss curtain.' He shuddered and denied himself the thought of Mary Trevena for a week. But he was pursued in imagination by that phrase, ‘a kiss curtain,' and by the necessity for surrendering her at last to the atrocious, engulfing appetite of the Man.

II

Mrs. Hartsfield and the others took counsel with Barry Whelan as to how they could persuade Mr. Trossett to disgorge his masterpiece.

'He is just shy, poor thing,' said Mrs. Hartsfield. 'We must encourage him to realize that he is really very clever and could not possibly fail.'

Whelan snorted pleasantly at the mere suggestion of failure. He knew personally a great many actors; in fact Miss Constance Tremaine herself was his distant cousin. He even knew a few managers and one play agent. He had heard often enough of what those people were all looking for, and he refused to believe that many of the flourishing playwrights could be compared with Trossett for downright cleverness. He would be only too happy to get the play produced. If it had a good woman's part he would try to persuade Connie Tremaine to consider it for herself. They would provide it with such presentation that it could not possibly fail. He was eager to get 'old Trossett' out into greatness with a friendly push.

So the circle around Mrs. Hartsfield conspired with the Man in poor Trossett's imagination to bring the affair of Mary Trevena to a conclusion. Once he had admitted that the play was in progress he was warmly asked for news whenever he appeared. His little formula, 'Sometime I hope to be able to talk about it,' wore out and he had to substitute, 'Oh, it's getting on, thank you.' And it did get on. Their importunings were brazen now and he tried to satisfy their affectionate greed for his glory. But he never really faced the fact that some day Mrs. Hartsfield would say, 'But, my dear Mr. Trossett, is n't it finished yet?' and he would have to go home and write the dreadful final scene when the Man got Mary Trevena.

When he felt that necessity threatening, he tried to be consoled with the thought that the Man was only part of himself. The conclusion could not rob him of Mary's presence. She would remain in his household although captured and tamed at last.

When the crisis came and he sat down at his writing-table, with the presence of Mary Trevena behind him in her seat by the fire, Mr. Trossett could scarcely hold his fingers steady to write the last fatal sentences. They went like this:

THE MAN (often he wrote "The Brute' instead of 'The Man'). Don't you realize, my dear Mary, that life is not made up entirely of gossamer dreams and the shine of dew in the morning?

M. T. If only it could be!

THE MAN. No. Things must happen. Playing is enough for children, Mary, but you and I are grown up. And other children are waiting to take our places.

(He was a Brute, sometimes.)

M. T. I love morning better than

noon.

THE MAN. But noon comes on and then we cannot always be hesitating. I love you, Mary.

-

Mr. Trossett struggled hard to avoid that banal phrase, but every substitute he tried sounded even more banal and less dignified. He had finally to let it stand, common as earth and life. He glanced back over his shoulder once or twice to see if he could conjure up any visible sign of her presence. He could not be sure. Her portrait, finished now and framed above his table, had averted eyes. He wiped his forehead, laughing gently at his own agony. He underlined the words, 'I love you, Mary.'

And Mary answered, in spidery tracings on the white sheet, 'Of course.

How else could we be happy, belonging to each other as we do?'

Then Mr. Trossett gave way completely and dropped his pen. He turned toward the back of her chair, but dared not go round to his own seat for fear he would not see her. 'Mary,' he whispered, and that was the first time he had ever spoken directly to her, ‘I promise that no one else shall ever know. That is life, what I have written down, but you and I are not bound to live. We'll just go on pretending that there is no end to anything. Only stay as you are, as you have been for so long. Stay here with me and no one shall ever know what I have written about you.'

He held out his hands in trembling appeal to the back of the chair. She must stay there forever to justify a love of blue china. But his back was turned to the seductive blue shine on the mantelshelf. He was staring at the chair arm, praying for the sight of green silk. 'Mary,' he said, 'this Man - this Brute is myself. I want you - I want you' He seized the chair with hot hands and whirled it about. A flaming passion choked him. Appalled by his own eagerness he buried his face in the shadowy softness where a real woman should have been.

III

When Barry Whelan came next time and noticed a heap of manuscript he was checked in the act of glancing at it.

"The thing is finished,' Trossett confessed, in a chilly voice, 'but no one is ever going to see it.' Before Whelan's fascinated eyes he picked it up and threw it into a cabinet. 'I never expect to look at it again myself.' He slammed the door of the cabinet, and when his guest tried to argue with him he sat in tight-lipped obstinacy against which nothing could prevail.

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