kept on
with her career. It was marriage that had been the catastrophe--the fatal
blunder. Marriage and domesticity for a woman like that! It was
asinine--worse--criminal! It ought to have been forbidden by law. And the
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 peopl