And then he pressed her for an immediate decision. The job would be a
good deal of a scramble at best, as the time was short. If she agreed to
it, he'd get in touch with the wardrobe mistress at the Globe, to-night.
As for the money, he had a hundred dollars or so in his pocket, which
she could take to start out with.
Of course the only lie involved in all this was the warp of the whole
fabric; that he was doing it, impersonally, for the success of the show.
And that might well enough have been true. Only in this case, it
definitely wasn't. He was doing it because it would establish a personal
connection, the want of which was becoming so tormenting a thing to his
soul, between himself and this girl whom he had to order about on the
stage and call by her last name, or rather by a last name that wasn't
hers--an imagination-stirring, question-compelling, warm human creature,
who, up to now, had been as completely shut away from him as if she had
been a wax figure in a show-window.
They had reached the Randolph Street end of the avenue, and a policeman,
like Moses cleaving the Red Sea, had opened the way through the tide of
motors for a throng of pedestrians bound across the viaduct to the
Illinois Central suburban station.
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