After dinner Joan treated herself to the experience of lounging in one
of the corridors of the hotel, the one (she fancied: she wasn't sure)
known through the Town as "Peacock Alley."
She pretended to be waiting for somebody, made her gaze seem more
abstracted than demure. Inwardly she quivered with the excitement, the
exaltation of forming a part of that rich and sensuous scene.
There were women all about her, many women of all ages and from every
grade of society, alike in one respect alone, that they were radiantly
dressed and, like Joan, found pleasure in sunning themselves in the
soft, diffused glow of the many shaded electric lamps as well as in the
regard, as a rule less shaded, of that endless parade of men who moved,
sometimes alone, again with other men, more commonly with women,
continually from one part to another of the hotel.
Muted strains from an excellent orchestra, not too near, added the final
touch of enchantment to this ensemble.
Entranced though, indeed, seeming little more conscious of her
surroundings than one in a day-dream, Joan was acutely sensitive to all
that passed in her vicinity. Not a woman came within the range of her
vision without being critically inspected, dissected, analyzed,
catalogued, both as to her apparel and as to the foundations for her
pretensions to social position or beauty. Not a man strolled by, were he
splendid in evening dress or merely "smart" in the ubiquitous "sack
suit" of the period, without being scrutinized and appraised with a
minute attention to detail that would have flattered him had it been
less covert.
Joan felt the lust for this life burning like a fire through all her
being: there was nothing she could imagine more desirable than to live
always as lived, apparently, these hundreds of well-groomed,
high-spirited, carefree people....
She had been steeping her soul in the blandishments of this atmosphere
for fully half an hour, and was beginning to think it time to return to
her room, when she was momentarily startled out of her assumed
preoccupation by sight of one who hadn't been far from her thoughts at
any time since her break with Quard.
He came walking her way from the general direction of the bar, with
another man--both attired as richly as masculine conventions permit in
America, and not altogether unconscious of the fact, each in his way
guilty of a mild degree of swagger. Of the two, the one betraying the
most ease and freedom from ostentation was one known to Joan, chiefly
through the medium of his portraits published in _The Morning Telegraph_
and other theatrical organs, as "Arlie" Arlington, a producing manager
locally famous both for his wit and the shrewdness and success with
which he contrived to gauge, year in, year out, public taste in musical
comedies. Broadway had tagged him "the only trustworthy friend of the
Tired Business Man." Infrequently Arlington adventured in plays without
music or dancing, but as a rule with far less success.
His companion, the man whom, Joan felt, she had been subconsciously
waiting for ever since entering the hotel, was Vincent Marbridge.
She was impressed with the appositeness of his appearance there to her
unexpressed desire, this man who had been so plainly struck by her
charms at first sight and who was credited with silent partnership in
many of Arlington's enterprises. And comprehending for the first time
fully how much she had been subjectively counting on meeting him again
and enlisting his sympathies--his sympathies at least--she steeled
herself against the shock of recognition, lest she betray her fast
mounting anxiety. He must not for a moment be permitted to suspect she
considered him anything but the most distant of acquaintances or
believed him to have been the anonymous author of that magnificent gift
of roses....
But Marbridge passed without seeing her, at all events without knowing
that he saw her. Rolling a little as he walked, with that individual
sway of his body from the hips, he leaned slightly toward Arlington and
gesticulated with immense animation while recounting some inaudible
anecdote which seemed to amuse both men mightily. And in the swing of
his narrative his glance, wandering, flickered across Joan's face and on
without in the least comprehending her as anything more than a lay
figure in a familiar setting.
But Arlington, less distracted, looked once keenly, and after he had
passed turned to look again.
In spite of this balm to her vanity, Joan flushed with chagrin. She knew
in her heart that Marbridge had not other than inadvertently slighted
her; yet she felt the cut as keenly as though it had been grossly
intentional.
Nevertheless she waited there for many minutes more, in the hope that he
would return and this time know her.
At length, however, she saw the two men again, at some distance,
standing by the revolving doors at the Thirty-third Street entrance.
Both now wore top-coats and hats. Marbridge was still talking, and
Arlington listening with the same expression of faintly constrained but
on the whole genuine amusement. And almost as soon as Joan discovered
them, they were joined by two women in brilliant evening gowns and
wraps. An instant later the party was feeding itself into the
inappeasable hopper of the revolving door, and so disappeared.
A prey to a sudden sensation of intense loneliness and
disappointment--and with this a trace of jealousy; for in spite of the
distance she had been able to see that both women were very
lovely--Joan got up and returned to her room....
An hour later she rose from a restless attempt to go to sleep, went to
the telephone and asked the switchboard operator to find out whether or
not Mr. Vincent Marbridge was a guest of the hotel.
The answer was in the affirmative, if modified by the information that
the party wasn't in just then.
Intensely gratified, the girl went back to bed and promptly fell asleep
formulating ingenious schemes to meet Marbridge by ostensible accident.
On the following day she lunched at the hotel, spent two fruitless hours
in its public corridors between tea time and time to dress for dinner,
and another in Peacock Alley after dinner, seeing nothing whatever of
Marbridge.
And the day after provided her with a fatiguing repetition of this
experience.
She began to be tremendously bored by this mode of existence, to sense
the emptiness, the vapidity of hotel life for a friendless woman.
Once or twice she revived and let her fancy play about her project to
revisit her family in the guise of Lady Bountiful, but only to defer its
execution against the time when she could go to them with another
engagement to drive home the stupendous proportions of her success.
Besides (she told herself) they seemed to be worrying along without her,
all right. If they cared anything about her, they could have written, at
least; Edna had the West Forty-sixth Street address....
Not once or twice but many a time and oft she found herself yearning
back to the homely society of the Sisters Dean's salon in the
establishment of Madame Duprat. And though she held back from revisiting
the house through fear of meeting Matthias, she wasted many an hour
promenading Broadway from Thirty-eighth Street north to Forty-eighth,
in the hope of encountering Maizie or May or one of their friends.
But it was singularly her fate to espy not one familiar face among the
multitude her wistful eyes reviewed during those dreary mid-afternoon
patrols.
Everybody she knew, it would seem, was either busy or resting out of
town.
On her fourth morning at the Waldorf, reading _The Morning Telegraph_
over the breakfast tray in her room, Joan ran across an illuminating
news item that carried a Buffalo date line. It chronicled the first
performance of Arlington's most recent venture, "Mrs. Mixer," announced
as a satirical comedy of manners by an author unknown either to Joan or
to fame, and projected by Arlington as a vehicle to exploit the putative
talents of Nella Cardrow, "the stage's latest recruit from the Four
Hundred." The Buffalo performance was, it appeared, the first of a
fortnight's trial on the road, following which the production was to be
withdrawn pending a metropolitan début in the Autumn.
The story of the first night was infused with a thinly sarcastic humour.
"After the final curtain," it pursued, "the audience filed reverently
from the house, omitting flowers, and Arlie Arlington broke a track
record reaching the nearest Western Union office to summon several
well-known ante-mortem specialists of New York to the bedside of the
patient. Meanwhile, Vincent Marbridge was hastily organized into a posse
of one to prevent Undertaker Cain from laying hands upon the sufferer
and carting it off to what might prove premature interment in the
mausoleum of his celebrated storage warehouses...."
Dropping the paper, Joan went directly to the telephone and asked the
office to have her bill ready within an hour's time.
From this she turned to pack her new possessions in a trunk as new.
It had never occurred to her that Marbridge might have left the hotel.