these many years, who had first recognized in this boy the genius for discovering and directing genius.  Daly was, at that time, at the zenith of his career—­managing, writing, directing, producing.  He fired the imagination of this stocky, gargoyle-faced boy with the luminous eyes and the humorous mouth.  I don’t know that Sid Hahn, hanging about the theatre in every kind of menial capacity, ever said to himself in so many words: 

“I’m going to be what he is.  I’m going to concentrate on it.  I won’t let anything or anybody interfere with it.  Nobody knows what I’m going to be.  But I know....  And you’ve got to be selfish.  You’ve got to be selfish.”

Of course no one ever really made a speech like that to himself, even in the Horatio Alger books.  But if the great ambition and determination running through the whole fibre of his being could have been crystallized into spoken words they would have sounded like that.

By the time he was forty-five he had discovered more stars than Copernicus.  They were not all first-magnitude twinklers.  Some of them even glowed so feebly that you could see their light only when he stood behind them, the steady radiance of his genius shining through.  But taken as a whole they made a brilliant constellation, furnishing much of the illumination for the brightest thoroughfare in the world.

He had never married.  There are those who say that he had had an early love affair, but that he had sworn not to marry until he had achieved what he called success.  And by that time it had been too late.  It was as though the hot flame of ambition had burned out all his other passions.  Later they say he was responsible for more happy marriages contracted by people who did not know that he was responsible for them than a popular east-side shadchen.  He grew a little tired, perhaps, of playing with make-believe stage characters, and directing them, so he began to play with real ones, like God.  But always kind.

No woman can resist making love to a man as indifferent as Sid Hahn appeared to be.  They all tried their wiles on him:  the red-haired ingenues, the blonde soubrettes, the stately leading ladies, the war horses, the old-timers, the ponies, the prima donnas.  He used to sit there in his great, luxurious, book-lined inner office, smiling and inscrutable as a plump joss-house idol while the fair ones burnt incense and made offering of shew-bread.  Figuratively, he kicked over the basket of shew-bread, and of the incense said, “Take away that stuff!  It smells!”

Not that he hated women.  He was afraid of them, at first.  Then, from years of experience with the femininity of the theatre, not nearly afraid enough.  So, early, he had locked that corner of his mind, and had thrown away the key.  When, years after, he broke in the door, lo! (as they say when an elaborate figure of speech is being used) lo! the treasures therein had turned to dust and ashes.