performance as it was, it went for nothing with Stewart Canby,
who did not even see it, for he walked entranced, not in a town,
but through orchards in bloom.

If Wanda Malone had remained with him, clear and insistent after
yesterday's impersonal vision of her at rehearsal, what was she
now, when every tremulous lilt of the zither-string voice, and
every little gesture of the impulsive hands, and every eager
change of the glowing face, were fresh and living, in all their
beautiful reality, but a matter of minutes past? He no longer
resisted the bewitchment; he wanted all of it. His companions
and himself were as trees walking, and when they had taken their
seats at a table in the men's restaurant of a hotel where he had
never been, he was not roused from his rapturous apathy even by
the conduct of probably the most remarkable maitre d'hotel in
the world.

"You don't git 'em!" said this personage briefly, when Potter
had ordered chops and "oeufs a la creole" and lettuce salad,
from a card. "You got to eat partridge and asparagus tips
salad!"

And he went away, leaving the terrible Potter resigned and
unrebellious.

The partridge was undeniable when it came; a stuffed man would
have eaten it. But Talbot Potter and his two guests did little
more than nibble it; they neither ate nor talked, and yet they
looked anything but unhappy. Detached from their surroundings,
as they sat over their coffee, they might have been taken to be