For a moment Mary watched him, as he studied the sketch intently.  Then she turned away to the kitchenette to help Joyce, thinking how lovely it must be to have a handsome man like that bend over your picture so adoringly, and speak of you in such a fashion.

It was a merry little dinner party, and afterwards it was almost like old times at the Wigwam, for Phil insisted on helping wipe the dishes, and was so boyish and jolly with his teasing reminiscences that she almost forgot her new awe of him.  But afterward when they sat around the woodfire in the studio ("a piece of Henry’s much enjoyed extravagance,” Joyce explained, “and only lighted on gala occasions like this”) they were suddenly all grown up and serious again.  Joyce talked about her work, and the friends she had made among editors and illustrators, and ambitious workaday people whose acquaintance was both a delight and an inspiration.  It was Henrietta who brought them to the studio, along with the Persian rugs and the “old masters,” and Joyce could never get done being thankful that she had found such a friend in the beginning of her career.

Phil told of his work too, and his travels, and in the friendly shadows cast by the flickering firelight talked intimately of his plans and ambitions, and what he hoped ultimately to achieve.

Betty confessed shyly some of her hopes and dreams, warranted now, by the success of several short flights in essay writing and verse, and then Phil said laughingly, “Do you remember what Mary’s dearest wish used to be?  How we roared the day she gravely informed us that it was her highest ambition to be ‘the toast of two continents,’ Is it still that, Mary?”

“No,” she answered, laughing with the rest, but blushing furiously.  “I had just been reading the biography of a great Baltimore belle who was called that, and it appealed to me as the most desirable thing on earth to be honoured with such a title.  But that was away back in the dark ages.  Of course I wouldn’t wish such a silly thing now.”

“But aren’t you going to tell us what is your greatest ambition?” persisted Phil.  “We have all confessed.  It isn’t fair for you to withhold your confidence when we’ve given ours.”

Mary shook her head.  “I’ve had my lesson,” she declared.  “You’ll never have the chance to laugh twice, and this one is such a sky-scraper it would astonish you.”

When she spoke, she was thinking of that moment on the stair, under the amber window, when through the music she heard the king’s call, and was first awakened to the knowledge that a high destiny awaited her.  What it was to be was still unrevealed to her, but of the voice and the vision she had no doubt.  Whatever it was she was sure it would be higher and greater than anything any one she knew aspired to.  Yet somehow, sitting there in the friendly shadows, with the firelight shining on the earnest manly face opposite, she did not care so much about a Joan of Arc career as she had.  It would be glorious, of course, but it might be lonesome.  People on pedestals were shut off from dear delightful intimacies like this.