radiance of a great red glow such as he had seen used for effective
purposes upon the stage--and just as every object of scenery had taken,
for the time, a portion of the transfiguring suffusion--so now the
external ugly details among which he moved were bathed in the high
coloured light of his imagination.

But if the end is sometimes long in coming, it comes at last even to the
visions of youth, and when his tired limbs finally dragged his soaring
spirit to earth, he took a passing car and came home to luncheon. The
glamour had faded suddenly from his dreams, as if a bat's wing had
fluttered overhead, and in his new mood, he felt a resurgence of his old
self-consciousness. He was provoked by the suspicion that he had shown
less as a coming dramatist than as a present fool, and he contrasted his
own awkwardness with Adams' whimsical ease of manner. Did a woman ever
forget how a man appeared when she first met him? Would any amount of
fame to-morrow obliterate from Laura's memory his embarrassment of
yesterday? He had heard that the surface impression was what counted in
the feminine mind, and this made him think enviously, for a minute, of
Perry Bridewell--of his handsome florid face and his pleasant animal
magnetism. Perry was stupid and an egoist, and yet he had heard that
Mrs. Bridewell, for all her beauty and her wit, adored him, while he
openly neglected her. Was the secret of success, after all, simply an
indifference to everyone's needs except one's own? or was it rather the
courage to impress the world that one's own were the only needs that
counted?

He was late for luncheon but his mother had waited for him, and he found
when he entered the drawing room that Christina Coles was with her. The
girl still wore her hat, but she had removed her jacket, and it lay with
a little brown package on the sofa. As she spoke to him he was struck