their existences so as to avoid responsibilities of any kind save the maintenance of their bars and the deduction of their percentages from the box-office receipts, Paul knew that it was ludicrous to expect it to interest itself in the correspondence of an obscure member of a fourth-rate company which had once played to tenth-rate business within its mildewed walls.  Being young, he wrote also to the human envelope containing the essence of stale beer, tobacco and lethargy that was the stage doorkeeper.  But he might just as well have written to the station master or the municipal gasworks.  As a matter of fact Jane and he were as much lost to one another as if the whole of England had been primaeval forest.

It was a calamity which he regarded with dismay.  He had many friends of the easy theatrical sort, who knew him as Paul Savelli, a romantically visaged, bright-natured, charming, intellectual, and execrably bad young actor.  But there was only one Jane who knew him as little Paul Kegworthy.  No woman he had ever met—­and in the theatrical world one is thrown willy-nilly into close contact with the whole gamut of the sex—­gave him just the same close, intimate, comforting companionship.  From Jane he hid nothing.  Before all the others he was conscious of pose.  Jane, with her cockney common-sense, her shrewdness, her outspoken criticism of follies, her unfailing sympathy in essentials, was welded into the very structure of his being.  Only when he had lost her did he realize this.  Amidst all the artificialities and pretences and pseudo-emotionalities of his young actor’s life, she was the one thing that was real.  She alone knew of Bludston, of Barney Bill, of the model days the memory of which made him shiver.  She alone (save Barney Bill) knew of his high destiny—­for Paul, quick to recognize the cynical scepticism of an indifferent world, had not revealed the Vision Splendid to any of his associates.  To her he could write; to her, when he was in London, he could talk; to her he could outpour all the jumble of faith, vanity, romance, egotism and poetry that was his very self, without thought of miscomprehension.  And of late she had mastered the silly splenetics of childhood.  He had an uncomfortable yet comforting impression that latterly she had developed an odd, calm wisdom, just as she had developed a calm, generous personality.  The last time he had seen her, his quick sensitiveness had noted the growth from girl to woman.  She was large, full-bosomed, wide-browed, clear-eyed.  She had not worried him about other girls.  She had reproved him for confessed follies in just the way that man loves to be reproved.  She had mildly soared with him into the empyrean of his dreams.  She had enjoyed whole-heartedly, from the back row of the dress-circle, the play to which he had taken her—­as a member of the profession he had, in Jane’s eyes, princely privileges—­and on the top of the Cricklewood omnibus she had eaten, with the laughter and gusto of her twenty years, the exotic sandwiches he had bought at the delicatessen shop in Leicester Square.  She was the ideal sister.