Peter went and left me sitting there in the shadow alone, while he stepped out on the stage all by himself—­the stage of his life.  And, oh, I was so glad to be in the shadow all by myself, for I had been as happy as I could and it was beginning to wear off.  I wanted Sam—­I wanted him even if the wonderful woman in the play was going to have him in real life, too, as I knew would have to happen some day.  Also Sam deserved to be there that night if anybody did, and he was way down in the Harpeth Valley working, working, working, it seemed to me, that all the rest of the world might play.  I wanted him!  I felt as if I couldn’t stand it when Peter stepped forward, looking like the most beautiful Keats the world had ever known, and the whole house gasped at his beauty and kept still to hear what a man that looked like that would have to say.  I stifled a sob and looked around to see if I could flee somewhere, when suddenly my groping hand was taken in two big, warm, horny ones, and Sam’s deep voice said in the same old fish-hook tone: 

“Steady, Bettykin, and watch old Pete take his first hurdle.”

I took one look at a great big glorious Sam in all sorts of fine linen that was purple in the mist of my eyes, and then I was perfectly quiet, with no fish-hook at all in my arm or in my life.  I heard every word of Peter’s speech, and laughed and almost cried over the one Farrington made about the young American drama, with his arm across Peter’s shoulder.  I forgot all about Sam because he was there, and just reveled in being happier than I had been since I had adopted Peter and the play, now that it was successfully out of our systems.

And it was successfully out.  Nobody who heard the thunder after the last act could have doubted that.  The New Times the next day said it was “The burgeoning of the American poetic drama,” and another paper said, “Bubbles fresh from the fount of American youth.”  We got the papers and read them coming home from Peter’s supper-party over at the Astor, which his New York friends gave because they wanted to see more of his Hayesboro friends.  Everybody was there and the success of the evening came when Pink Herriford told his mule story.  Peter made him do it, and everybody adored it.  And just as they were all laughing and exclaiming at the droll way in which he characterized those resurgent mules, I looked down the table and happened to see that Clyde Tolbot was holding Editha Morris Carruthers’s hand in a way that anybody who understood these matters knew from the position of their shoulders that such was the case.

“A taxicab lost us on Broadway at ten dollars per second, and I made connection with her wires before found,” he whispered to me, as we all rose to go, just as the night was also taking its departure from New York.  New York in the daytime is like a huge football game in which a million or two players all fall on the ball of life at the same time and kick and squirm and fight over it; but at night it is a dragon with billions of flaming eyes that only blink out when it is time to crawl away from the rising sun and get in a hole until the dark comes again.  It is the most wonderful city in the world to stay in until you are ready to go home.