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DON-A-DREAMS

get his point of view. While he was telling her of his quarrel with his father, she took his father's part against him, in her thoughts; and when he made a clean breast of his betrayal of Conroy, she sympathized with his victim and blamed him. She was accustomed to judge actions by the wisdom and justice of their results; the fact that he considered only the moral impulse that inspired the act escaped her. She was relieved by his smiling forgiveness of her interference in his affairs, but she did not see why this interference should draw him to her.

They were separated by the movement of the play and did not meet again until the third act, set to represent an English lawn party in which they sat at one of a number of rustic tables among stage trees. It was necessary that they should appear to be engaged in an animated conversation, oblivious to the actions of the principals who spoke their lines in the foreground of the scene; and she asked him how he liked his new profession of actor. He replied that he liked it very much—but he could not tell why. Certainly it would enable him to live without borrowing. He was to be paid 75 cents a performance; so that, with the two matinées, he would receive six dollars a week. He was looking around for something to do in the idle mornings. "At any rate, it's better than boosting on Bowery," he said; and he proceeded to tell her of that adventure.

It led up to the problems which he had discussed with Walter Pittsey in Central Park, and thence to the question of religion which he had broached with her on