of the uncomfortable reality of Ket in jail, of Dads' frauds and mamma's infirmities, into the world of Douglas Fairbanks' marvels, of Mary Pickford's perfections, of Barthelmess and Valentino. It was an exciting but also it was a soothing and encouraging world, where everything always came out happily in the end, where truth was sure to triumph, ambitions be realized, and where a girl's will, backed by a book costing $3.50, could not possibly fail to transform a Ket into a Mozart.
Her friend invited her to a dance-hall, but she begged off and went home, where she found mamma already asleep, under veronal, and Dads out, as usual.
Joan Daisy went immediately to bed and lay repeating to herself the phrases of the program of the concert when Ket's great symphony should be played, hoping to-night to regain her dream, which had been destroyed on that night when the heels of the police clicked in the court and when Mr. Clarke, for the State, had come. But she did not succeed, for Mr. Clarke kept cutting across the vision she summoned. Sometimes he was official and stern, as he was when first he had appeared for the State; sometimes he was "Mr. God-looking" and she hated him; but then he became amazed and bewildered, like a boy, when she had "handed it to him" in the hotel room, while the police stenographer took down the words in which she told him he was a readymade; and then he was flushed and absurd in the automat, where he had begun to buy a beef pie and hadn't gone through with it.
At this her waking memory became distorted by a vivid vagary of dreaming; she laughed, caught the bedclothes closer and so fell asleep.
Calvin was not yet in bed, although he had reached his rooms long before she had returned to hers. He was restless with a new excitement, broken now and then
