like a sparkling clean window. I can see into every mood.”
“Oh!” It all came back to Meg in a rush. “I haven’t mailed that other letter yet.”‘
“What letter?”
“I’ll get it.”
Meg hurried into the study. The envelope addressed to Amos Cottle was lying on the desk, just as she had left it. She picked up the letter beside it and glanced at her own typing. The words seemed to dance on the page.
“My dear Vera, I learned from this evenings paper…”
What had she done?
The untidied room—the frantic search for pen and paper—Hugh’s sudden interruption—Polly’s persistent wail, “But what shall I do?”—the mad chaos of getting Hugh off with the Devlins … It had been one long series of distractions and, in the general confusion, she had put the letter addressed to Amos in the envelope air-mailed to Vera.
Tomorrow morning Vera would be reading the letter to Amos that described Vera herself as a difficult house guest, an embarrassingly incompetent actress and a vicious woman.
CHAPTER TWO
When Christmas shopping brought Philippa Kane to town, she usually arranged to meet her husband at the Commodore Bar close by Grand Central, so they could go home on the train together. Tonight she found their favorite table empty and established herself with a champagne cocktail, where she could watch both the clock and the revolving door.
Philippa was an aristocrat in the antique sense of the word. She always obtained the best for herself in every phase of life, great or small. She was wrapped in a voluminous cloak of the rare, sea otter fur, so dense that the finger cannot be forced down through the pelt to the skin. An enormous black alligator bag matched tiny alligator shoes. An unbelted dress of black jersey sculptured her torso to the new, Grecian line, and a speckled pheasant’s breast gave her turban the new width. Her gloves were soft, natural doeskin; her jewels, jade set with diamonds. Even her little coin purse was a limp, elegant affair of gold mesh with a diamond clasp, and her cigarette case was polished olive wood with an ivory intaglio of Apollo and the Three Muses, cunningly carved in miniature after a design taken from an Attic vase.
A russet lipstick brought out the faint, reddish glints in her pale chestnut hair and the faintest touch of emerald eye shadow gave her gray eyes an olive cast. Her face echoed portraits of the Empress Eugenie—a pallid, perfect oval with fastidiously arched brows, long, narrow eyes, an arrogant nose and a disillusioned mouth. Her smile twisted sardonically when she saw Tony struggling through the revolving door with two typescript boxes under one arm and an evening newspaper stuck in his overcoat pocket. He didn’t look at all the way Philippa thought the President of Sutton, Kane and Company should look.
Philippa had come into the world of writers and publishers through marriage. She was born into a different world of gilt-edged bond portfolios and real estate holdings in the heart of Manhattan, apartments on upper Fifth Avenue and palatial cottages in the Hamptons. Like most third-generation heiresses, she took little interest in the unromantic industries that built her grandparents’ fortune. Her Europeanized education made her ideal of luxury the life of the Victorian leisure class. It was inevitable that she should shape her life around one of the three classic amusements of that class—politics, sport or the arts. But today all three are highly competitive professions where the amateur has small chance of success. Philippa wanted to write and couldn’t, but, through her attempts to write she met Tony Kane, then a young assistant editor with a publishing firm called Daniel Sutton and Company.
Her widowed mother tried everything short of corporal punishment to break off what she called a mésalliance. Time had its usual revenge. The 1929 crash swallowed the substantial residue of a once great fortune. Tony and Philippa were married in 1931 and, for several years before her death, Philippa’s mother was wholly dependent on Tony as Philippa herself was now.
Like many literary amateurs, she had soon discovered that professional writers are more attractive in books than in real life. Some of the most talented, and therefore the most profitable to Tony, had the most outrageous personalities and no manners at all. In fact it seemed almost as if the more successful a writer was the more eccentric he became—exactly the reverse of the situation in her father’s cosmos where the most successful were the most conventional.
Philippa today had just one word for writers—impossible. You never knew where they came from or what their parents had been. Some got drunk at parties, some tried to borrow money, some got involved in tortuous love affairs and all talked openly about things that were never mentioned in other circles. The fact that they sometimes talked brilliantly was no mitigation to Philippa now. Writers were economically unstable, broke one day and living like princes the next. Even a publisher as prosperous as Tony seemed like a tramp to Philippa. For one thing, he had no capital; he had to spend all he earned after taxes in order to maintain what she considered a normal standard of living. For another thing, he was constantly in touch with writers, and their influence corrupted his sense of decorum.
Of all her youthful ideals, Philippa had kept only one—her worship of the really great writer. She could forgive any eccentricity or even vulgarity in a man she believed to be a genius. What she found intolerable was the eccentricity without the genius that was so common in Tony’s world today.
Tony finally extricated himself from the revolving door and threaded his way between other tables to hers.
“Hi, Phil!” He dropped his bundles on a vacant chair, added his hat and overcoat to the pile and slumped into a seat opposite her. “Whew! What a day! Double Gibson for me.”
He lit a cigarette and eyed her warily through the smoke. His eyes had not faded with middle age. They were still a deliberate blue, without a hint of gray or hazel, and his rather full, round face was unlined. But his figure had lost its lean look and there was gray in the blond hair like a sprinkling of ashes.
“What’s wrong, Tony?”
“Wrong? Nothing’s wrong. It’s just that I’ve had a hard day and…”
“Tony, dear, you really can’t fool me after all these years. That wary look means you want me to do something for you that I won’t want to do. What is it this time? Not one of those dreadful creatures from behind the Iron Curtain who has written another Twenty Years in a Slave State? The last one broke Grandmother’s Dresden teapot and I’m sure he has those missing salt spoons unless he’s pawned them by now.”
“Nothing like that.” Tony reached eagerly for his Gibson. “Amos is in trouble.”
“Amos? Oh, dear, what are we supposed to do for him now?” Petulance poisoned her voice. “He even has to live near us in the country so you can spend all your spare time holding his hand. And he’s such a dull, common little man.”
“But you do like his books,” protested Tony.
“The last one wasn’t as good as the others. I think he’s slipping.”
“Don’t say that.” Tony frowned and took another swallow of his cocktail. “Don’t even think it. Amos means a lot to us. More than you realize. Not many men can turn out four books in four years and win the approval of both critics and public. Amos is quite a phenomenon. He made Sutton, Kane what it is today.”
“Couldn’t we do without him now?”
“Frankly we couldn’t.” Tony’s
