audiences ceased to expect a row of a dozen youths, all dressed
alike with gardenias in their buttonholes and perhaps red neckties
with their evening suits, to rise in their boxes on the star's
appearance and solemnly bow. And the star herself lost a little
of the anxious look she frequently wore.

The story went, after a while, that Judson Clark had been refused,
and was taking his refusal badly. Reporters saw him, carelessly
dressed, outside the stage door waiting, and the story went that
the girl had thrown him over, money and all, for her leading man.
One thing was clear; Clark, not a drinker before, had taken to
drinking hard, and after a time, and some unpleasant scenes probably,
she refused to see him any more.

When the play closed, in June, 1911, she married Howard Lucas, her
leading man; his third wife. Lucas had been not a bad chap, a
good-looking, rather negligible man, given to all-day Sunday poker,
carefully valeted, not very keen mentally, but amiable. They had
bought a house on East Fifty-sixth Street, and were looking for a
new play with Lucas as co-star, when he unaccountably went to pieces
nervously, stopped sleeping, and developed a slight twitching of
his handsome, rather vacuous face.

Judson Clark had taken his yacht and gone to Europe, and was
reported from here and there not too favorably. But when he came
back, in early September, he had apparently recovered from his
infatuation, was his old, carefully dressed self again, and when
interviewed declared his intention of spending the winter on his
Wyoming ranch.