III.
He was there again. She saw him when she took her first glance at the restless Manhattan audience—down in the front row with his head bent a bit forward and his gray eyes fixed on her. And she knew that to him they were alone together in a world where the high-rouged row of ballet faces and the massed whines of the violins were as imperceivable as powder on a marble Venus. An instinctive defiance rose within her.
“Silly boy!” she said to herself hurriedly, and she didn’t take her encore.
“What do they expect for a hundred a week—perpetual motion?” she grumbled to herself in the wings.
“What’s the trouble, Marcia?”
“Guy I don’t like down in front.”
During the last act as she waited for her specialty she had an odd attack of stage fright. She had never sent Horace the promised pos
