y won't
have a chance. They wouldn't get excited about me whatever happened.
They'd go on patronizing me and yawning in my face no matter how good I
was. I'd do just as well, he says, so far as my career is concerned, to
stay right here in Chicago and get Campanini to give me two or three
appearances a season;--make a sort of amateur night of it for the gold
coast to buzz about. I'd have a lot easier time that way and it would
come to the same thing in the end. And he says that unless I want to go
in for his scheme, that's what I'd better do. Well, and he's right. I can
see that, plainly enough."

Mary refrained from asking what Max's scheme was. She'd learn, no doubt,
in her stepmother's own good time. She nodded a tentative assent to Max's
general premises and waited.

"He certainly was frank enough," Paula went on after a while. "He wants
to make a real killing he says. Something he's never quite brought off
before. He says the reason he's always failed before is that he's had to
go and mix a love-affair up with it somehow. He's either fallen in love
with the woman or she with him or if it was a man he was managing, they
both went mad over the same woman. Something always happened anyhow to
make a mess of it. But he says he isn't interested in me in the least in
that way and that he can see plainly enough that I'm not in him. But
imagine five years with him!"

She broke off with a shudder, not a real shudder though. The sort one
makes over a purely imaginary prospect. Some expression of her feeling
must have betrayed itself in Mary's face, for Paula, happening to look at
her just then, sat up abruptly.

"Oh, I know," she said. "It's all very well, but that's the sort of
person you have to go in with and that's the sort of scheme you have to
go into if you're going to get anywhere. Something of the sort anyhow,--I
never heard of one exactly like this. But this is what he proposes: we're
each to put up twenty thousand dollars. That's easy enough as far as I'm
concerned because what I put up isn't to be spent at all. It's just to be
turned over to somebody--some banker like Martin Whitney--as a guarantee
that I won't break my contract. He says he wouldn't take on anybody in my
position without a guarantee like that. He's to spend the money he puts
up for publicity and other things but he's to get paid back out of what I
earn. He's to be my manager absolutely. I'm to go wherever he says; carry
out any contracts he ma