stubbornness of her!  After all these years, remembering, Max Hempel could have groaned aloud.  Every stage manager in New York, including himself, had been ready to bankrupt himself offering her what in those days were almost incredible contracts to prevent her from the suicidal folly on which she was bent.  But to no avail.  She had laughed at them all, laughed and quit the stage at six and twenty, and a few years later her beauty and genius were still—­in death.  What a waste!  What a damnation waste!

At this point in his animadversions Max Hempel again looked at the girl in the newspaper, the girl who was the product of the very marriage he had been cursing, LaRue’s only daughter.  If there had been no marriage, neither would there have been this glorious, radiant, vividly alive young creature.  Men called Laura LaRue dead.  But was she?  Was she not tremendously alive in the life of her lovely young daughter?  Was it not he, and the other childless ones who had treated matrimony as the one supreme mistake, that would soon be very much dead, dead past any resurrection?

Pshaw!  He was getting sentimental.  He wasn’t here for sentiment.  He was here for cold, hard business.  He was taking this confounded journey to witness an amateur performance of a Shakespeare play, when he loathed traveling in hot weather, detested amateur performances of anything, particularly of Shakespeare, on the millionth of a chance that Antoinette Holiday might be possessed of a tithe of her mother’s talent and might eventually be starred as the new ingenue he was in need of, afar off, so to speak.  It was Carol Clay herself who had warned him.  Carol was wonderful—­would always be wonderful.  But time passes.  There would come a season when the public would begin to count back and remember that Carol had been playing ingenue parts already for over a decade.  There must always be youth—­fresh, flaming youth in the offing.  That was the stage and life.

As for this Antoinette Holiday girl, he had none too much hope.  Max Hempel never hoped much on general principles, so far as potential stars were concerned.  He had seen too many of them go off fizz bang into nothingness, like rockets.  It was more than likely he was on a false trail, that people who had seen the girl act in amateur things had exaggerated her ability.  He trusted no judgment but his own, which was perhaps one of the reasons why he was one of the greatest living stage managers.  It was more than likely she had nothing but a pretty, shallow little talent for play acting and no notion under the sun of giving up society or matrimony or what-not for the devilish hard work of a stage career.  Very likely there was some young galoot waiting even now, to whisk Laura LaRue’s daughter off the stage before she ever got on.