He was late for luncheon but his mother had waited for him, and he found when he entered the drawing room that Christina Coles was with her.  The girl still wore her hat, but she had removed her jacket, and it lay with a little brown package on the sofa.  As she spoke to him he was struck afresh by the singular concentration of her expression.

“Your mother tells me that you’ve written a play,” she began, a little shyly; “she says, too, that it is wonderful.”

“‘She says’ is well put,” he retorted gaily, “but I hear that you, also, are among the prophets.”

“I am nothing else,” she answered earnestly.  “It is everything to me—­it is my life.”

Her frankness startled him unpleasantly, and but for her girlish prettiness, he might have felt himself almost repelled.  As it was he merely glanced appealingly at his mother, who intervened with a gesture of her knitting needle.  “She writes stories,” explained the old lady, appearing to transfix her subject on the ivory point; “it is just as I imagined.”

The girl herself met his eyes almost fiercely, reminding him vaguely of the look with which a lioness might defend her threatened young.

“I’ve done nothing yet,” she declared, “but I mean to—­I mean to if it takes every single hour I have to live.”  Then her manner changed suddenly, and she impressed him as melting from her hard reserve.  “Oh, she tells me that you’ve met Laura Wilde!” she said.

The sacred name struck him, after his impassioned dreaming, like a sharp blow between the eyes, and he met the girl’s animated gesture with a look of blank aversion.

“I’ve met her—­yes,” he answered coldly.

But her enthusiasm was at white heat, and he saw what he had thought mere prettiness in her warm to positive beauty.  “And you adore her work as I do?” she exclaimed.

After a moment’s hesitation his ardour flashed out to meet her own.  “Oh, yes, I adore her work and her!” he said.

CHAPTER VI

SHOWS THAT MR. WORLDLY-WISE-MAN MAY BELONG TO EITHER SEX

Several afternoons later Trent was to have further light thrown on the character of Christina Coles by a chance remark of Roger Adams, into whose office he had dropped for a moment as he was on his way to make his first call upon Mrs. Bridewell.

After a few friendly enquiries about the young man’s own work, and the report of a promising word from the great Benson, Adams took up a letter lying loose among the papers on his big littered desk.

“Half the tragedy in New York is contained in a letter like this,” he observed.  “Do you know, by the way, that the mass of outside literary workers drawn in at last by the whirlpool constitutes almost a population?  Take this girl, now, she is so consumed by her ambition, for heaven knows what, that she comes here and starves in an attic rather than keep away in comfort.  That reminds me,” he added, with a sudden recollection, “she’s from your part of the country.”