le Slipper" greeted
him.

"She has gone out to luncheon with a damned tango lizard," was the
disturbed and disturbing answer his courtesy received.

"What do you mean?" demanded Mr. Farraday, bristling.

"She met Gerald Height a half-hour ago, here in this office, and then
went out to luncheon with him," was Mr. Vandeford's answer to Mr.
Farraday's bristling.

"Without consulting you?"

"No! I consented all right enough."

"Why didn't you tell her if you didn't want her to go with him?"

"See here, Denny, I want to ask you if anything in my past life makes
you think that I am a proper old hen to have a downy little chicken
thrust right under my wing for safe keeping, whether I hatched her or
not?" Mr. Vandeford demanded, and his rage was so perfectly impersonal
and perplexed that Mr. Farraday sat down to go into the matter to his
rescue.

"What do you mean, Van?" he asked in a calm voice and manner that were
most grateful to Mr. Vandeford.

"Just this: Here's a girl come up here, from a place where a girl is
guarded like a pearl of great price, into the muck and excitement of the
getting together of a Broadway production in which she is directly
interested. I don't know what to do. If I spend my time hovering over
her, her show will go cold and break her. She's poor. I told her as much
of what she is in for as I dared and still she wants to stay and see it
all through, demands to stay and be let in for the whole thing. What'll
we do?"

"Suppose she'd go with me up to visit the mater and be motored down to
participate in--in expurgated moments?" asked Mr. Farraday, as he
ruffled his hair into a huge plume on the top of his head.

"She would not. She's got a taste of it and she'll thirst for more. And,
for all that unsophistication, she is a clever kid. She'll get Height
into a costume play before luncheon is over and that'll go a long way to
cinch a hit for 'The Purple Slipper.' He's made a fad of not playing
costume, and all the women in New York will flock to see him in velvet
and lace. She bargained that fish Corbett out of four hundred dollars in
the preliminary costume deal, and if anybody has to send her home it
will have to be you. I can't do it."

"Well, just gently warn her about Height and things of that kind, can't
you?"

"I cannot! Would you tell a woman who is walking a tight rope that the
ground sixty feet below her is covered with broken champagne bottles?"

"Then she's got to go home,"