the confidence was unintentional and deeply
regretted?"

"Ah!" he answered, "you saw that, did you? Well, I've been listening and
waiting to hear about the 'new play' ever since, but not a word have you
dropped, and I did not ask for silence either. You are a woman worth
talking to, and I shall never be afraid to tell you things I am going to
do, and----"

And straightway he told me all about the new play--its good points, its
bad ones, and where he feared for it; and to show you how true was his
judgment, the play, which later on gave me a great personal success, was
itself a failure from the very causes he then indicated.

And so it came about that Mr. Daly, putting aside his dislike for
me--coming to enjoy my sense of the ridiculous, instead of resenting
it--confided many, many plans and dreams, likes and dislikes, hates and
loves to me. We quarreled spitefully over politics, fought furiously over
religion, wickedly bowed down and worshipped before odds and ends of
lovely carvings or precious _cloisonne_, to whose beauty I first
introduced him, and hung in mutual rapture over rare old engravings.

Thus I came to know him fairly well. A man with unbounded ambition, a man
of fine and delicate tastes, with a passionate love of beauty--in form,
color, sound. I have known him to turn a sentence, exquisitely, word by
word, slowly repeating the line, as though he were tasting its beauty, as
well as hearing it. Interested in the occult and the inscrutable--a man
of many tastes, but of one _single purpose_--every power and acquirement
were brought to the service of the stage.

In love he was mutability personified. In friendship, always exigent. Now
sullenly silent, now rapidly talkative, whimsical, changeable, he was
ever lavishly generous and warm-hearted. And it is a comfort to know that
in one respect at least I proved satisfactory during the friendship that
lasted as long as I remained in the theatre, since I never, even by
chance, betrayed his confidence.

When we had finally parted, a man one day mentioned me to Mr. Daly,
expecting to bring forth some disparaging remark. There was a pause while
my former manager gazed out at the heavily falling rain, then he said,
quietly: "When you drop a thing in a well, it can go no further. Clara
Morris is a sort of human well, what you confide to her goes no further.
Some people call that 'discretion,' I call it loyalty. I--I guess you'll
get a wetting on the way home." And