Moreover there was always her family to cope with, dyed in the wool New Englanders at that, no doubt with the heavy Puritan mortmain upon them, narrow as a shoe string, circumscribed as a duck pond, walled in by ghastly respectability.  Ten to one, if the girl had talent and ambition, they would smother these things in her, balk her at every turn.  They had regarded Ned Holiday’s marriage to Laura a misalliance, he recalled.  There had been quite a to-do about it at the time.  Good God!  It had been a misalliance all right, but not as they reckoned it.  It had not been considered suitable for a Holiday to marry an actress.  Probably it would be considered more unsuitable for a Holiday to be an actress.  Suitable!  Bah!  The question was not whether the career was fit for the girl, but whether the girl could measure up to the career.  And irascibly, unreasonably indignant as if he had already been contending in argument with legions of mythical, over-respectable Holidays, Max Hempel whipped his paper open to another page, a page that told of a drive somewhere on the western front that had failed miserably, for this was the year nineteen hundred and sixteen and there was a war going on, “on the other side.”  Oh, typically American phrase!

Meanwhile the young man, too, had stopped staring at Antoinette Holiday’s pictured face and was staring out of the window instead at the fast flying landscape.  He had really no need anyway to look at a picture of Tony.  His head and heart were full of them.  He had been storing them up for over eight years and it was a considerable collection by now and one in which he took great joy in lonely hours in his dingy little lodging room, or in odd moments as he went his way at his task as a reporter for a great New York daily.  The perspicuous reader will not need to be told that the young man was in love with Tony Holiday—­desperately in love.

Desperately was the word.  Slight as Max Hempel’s hope may have been that Laura LaRue’s daughter was to prove the ingenue he sought, infinitely slighter was Dick Carson’s hope of ever making Tony his wife.  How could it be otherwise?  Tony Holiday was as far above him in his own eyes as the top of Mount Tom was high above the onion beds of the valley.  The very name he used was his only because she had given it to him.  Dick Nobody he had been.  Richard Carson he had become through grace of Tony.

Like his companion the young man went back into the past, though not so far a journey.  As vividly as if it were but yesterday he remembered the misery of flesh and spirit which had been his as he stowed himself away in the hay loft in the Holiday’s barn, that long ago summer dawn, too sick to take another step and caring little whether he lived or died, conscious vaguely, however, that death would be infinitely preferable to going back to the life of the circus and the man Jim’s coarse brutality from which he had made his escape at last.