Part 6 (1/2)

”I don't believe--I _know_. I intend to make it my business to see that you do.”

There was a confident ring of masterful a.s.surance in his voice that carried delicious conviction. A person who was so absolutely sure of himself made other people sure of him, too, for the moment.

Eleanor, sitting low in the car, with her absent eyes fixed on the road ahead, lapsed into a daydream. From an absorbed contemplation of herself and her dramatic career, her mind veered in grat.i.tude to the one who most believed in its possibility. What a friend he had been! Just when she had been ready to give up in despair, he had fanned her dying hope into a glorious blaze that illuminated every waking hour. And it was not only his sympathetic interest in her thwarted ambition that touched her: it was also the fact that he had rescued her from the daily boredom of sitting with elderly ladies making interminable surgical dressings, and by an adroit bit of diplomacy outwitted the family and introduced her as a ward visitor at the camp hospital.

The mere thought of the hospital sent her mind flying off at a tangent.

Even the stage gave way for the moment to this new and all-absorbing occupation. Never in her life had she done anything so interesting. The escape from home, the personal contact with all those nice, jolly boys, the excitement of being of service for the first time in her b.u.t.terfly existence, was intoxicating. She smiled now as she thought of the way Graham's eager head always popped up the moment she entered the door, and of how his face shone when she talked to him. After all, she told herself, there _was_ something thrilling in having hands that had captured a machine-gun laboriously threading tiny beads for her, in having a soldier who had been decorated for courage stammer and blush in her presence.

”Well,” said the Captain, who had been lazily observing her, ”aren't you about through with your mental monologue?”

Eleanor roused herself with a start.

”Oh, I am sorry! I was thinking about my boys at the hospital. You can't imagine how I hate to leave them!”

The answer was evidently not what the Captain had expected. As long as his company of feminine admirers marched in adoring unison he was indifferent to their existence; but let one miss step and he was instantly on the alert.

”I haven't noticed any tears being shed over leaving me,” he said, and the aggrieved note in his voice promptly stirred her humor.

”Why should I mind leaving you? You don't need me.”

”How do you know?”

She looked at him scoffingly.

”You don't need anything or anybody. You've got all you want in yourself.”

”I'll show you what I want!” he said, and, quickly bending toward her, he kissed her on the cheek.

It was the merest brush of his lips, but it brought the color flaming into her face and the lightning into her eyes. She had never been so angry in her life, and it seemed to her an age that she sat there rigid and indignant, suffocated by his nearness but powerless to move away.

Then she got the car stopped, and announced with great dignity that she was nearly home and that she would have to ask him to get out.

Captain Phipps lazily descended from the car, then stood with elbows on the ledge of the door and rolled a cigarette with great deliberation.

Eleanor, in spite of her wrath, could not help admiring the graceful, conscious movement of his slender hands with their highly polished nails.

It was not until he had struck his match that he looked at her and smiled quizzically.

”What a dear little goose you are! Do you suppose that stage lovers are going to stand in the wings and throw kisses to you?”

”No,” said Eleanor hotly; ”but that will be different.”

”It certainly will,” he agreed amiably. ”You will not only have to be kissed, but you will have to kiss back. You have a lot of little puritanical prejudices to get over, my dear, before you can ever hope to act. You don't want to be a thin-blooded little old maid, do you?”

The shot was well aimed, for Eleanor had no desire to follow in the arid footsteps of her two spinster aunts. She looked at Captain Phipps unsteadily and shook her head.

”Of course you don't,” he encouraged her. ”You aren't built for it.

Besides, it's an actress's business to cultivate her emotions rather than repress them, isn't it?”