l set-to. "Besides," he
added, "if you are quite confident of settling everything to-morrow,
the trunk may just as well stay here over night."

To this Cleo ultimately agreed, won over by Morgan's last argument.
But none the less did she give loud expression to all that was in her
mind anent the lessees and the commissionaires. She went home again
with Morgan in the worst of humours at having been thus baffled. But
later in the evening she attired herself gaily and carried him off to
a little restaurant supper party, given by a gentleman he had met
before, but about whose occupation he possessed no information, though
he had gathered that the theatre was his chief interest. There was one
other lady, plentifully powdered, and two other men of the party, but
the host was the most garrulous of all, pouring out the most fulsome
flattery of Cleo's acting and assuring her the critics hadn't treated
her fairly and that all artistic aspiration was wasted on the British
public. The same ground was traversed again and again, the bulk of the
conversation centering round Cleo.

To Morgan it seemed that Cleo had made an enormous number of
acquaintances in the few weeks that had elapsed since their marriage,
and with many of them she appeared to be on terms of easy
_camaraderie_. Every day during the week scores of visitors had
dropped in to see her and to chat familiarly--all sorts of strange men
and women that seemed to flock round her, anomalous citizens of
Bohemia, vague hangers-on of the theatrical cosmos; all that strange
melange of the happy-go-lucky, the eccentric, the ill-balanced, the
blackguardly, the unprincipled, the hapless, the shiftless, the
unclassed, the sensual and the besotted that shoulder and hustle one
another in the world of the theatre; all the riff-raff recruited from
the greater world without by the fascinating glare of the footlights.

The supper was a gay one, and Cleo, drawing new life from the stream
of adulation, strolled home on Morgan's arm, overflowing with the
wonder of her own personality, was it in regard to her genius as an
actress, or was it in regard to the magnetism of her beauty. Her step
seemed to have recovered all its old springiness; her defeat was as if
it had not been. She was very optimistic about her career and again
spoke of Morgan one day writing the play of her life. That would be,
of course, after they had travelled in Egypt and the East. He was
sufficiently taken off his guar