I went home next day, leaving her in pursuit of her art.  But I got glowing letters from her about every week, she doing new pictures and her salary jumping because other film parties was naturally after so good a weeper.  And the next year I run down to see her.  She was a changed woman all right.  She had a home or bungalow, a car, a fashionable dog, a Jap cook, a maid and real gowns for the first time in her life.  But the changes was all outside.  She was still the same Vida that wanted to mother every male human on earth.  She never seemed to worry about girls and women; her idea is that they’re able to look out for themselves, but that men are babies needing a mother’s protection as long as they live.

And of course one of these men she had mothered down there had took a base advantage of her—­this same ugly old grouch of a director.  She locked the bedroom door and told me about it in horrified whispers the first night I got there.  She said it might of been her fault, that he might of misunderstood something she had said about Clyde.  And anyway she’d ought to of remembered that some men are beasts at heart.

Anyway, this infamous brute had come to the house one night and insulted her in the grossest manner, and it was all true about moving-picture directors having designs on unprotected females that work for ’em.  Yielding to his lowest brute instincts he had thrown decency to the winds and made her such an evil proposition that she could hardly bear to put it in words.  But she did.  It seems that the scoundrel had listened to some studio gossip to the effect that she had divorced the husband who deserted her, and so he come right out and said he had been deeply in love with her ever since that first day on the train, and now that she was free, would she marry him?

Of course she was insulted to the limit and told him so in what would probably of made a gripping scene of a good woman spurning the advances of a moral leper.  She overwhelmed him with scorn and horror for his foul words.  How dared he say her Clyde had deserted her, or think she would ever divorce him!  That showed, what a vile mind he must have.  She said he got awful meek and apologetic when he learned that she still clung to the memory of Clyde, who would one day fight his way back to her if he hadn’t ended it all.  She told him fully what a perfect man Clyde was, and she said at last the ugly old wretch just grinned weakly at her in a very painful way, like it hurt him, and said:  “Oh, my dearest, you must try to forgive me.  I didn’t know—­I didn’t know half the truth.”  Then he patted her hand and patted her cheek and choked up and swallowed a couple of times, and says he: 

“I was an old man dreaming and dreams make fools of old men!”

Then he swallowed again and stumbled out through her garden where the orange blossoms had just come.  She said he’d never been offensive since that time, barking as nasty to her as to any of the others when she was acting, so that no one would dream what a foul heart he had, except that he always kept a bunch of white roses in her dressing room.  But she hadn’t cared to make him trouble about that because maybe he was honestly trying to lead a better life.