There was none other in sight; and though he waited half an hour, none came. At last he could stand it no more, but hurried away to the nearest telegraph-office. “Has baby red hair?” he wrote. “Did he come to the park?” And then he went to his room and waited, and soon after came the reply: “Baby has golden hair. Nurse was ill. Could not come.”
Thyrsis read this, and then shut the door upon the messenger-boy, and burst into wild, hilarious laughter. He stood there with his arms stretched out, invoking all posterity to witness--“What do you think of _that?_ What do you think of _that?_”
And a full hour later he was sitting by his bedside, his chin supported on his hands, and still invoking posterity. “Will you ever know what I went through?” he was saying. “Will you ever realize what my books have cost?” Then he smiled grimly, thinking of Voltaire’s cruel epigram--that “letters addressed to posterity seldom reach their destination!”
Section 2. Thyrsis received a reply to his note, and went to call upon Miss Ethelynda Lewis. Miss Lewis dwelt in a luxurious apartment-house on Riverside Drive, where a colored maid showed him into a big parlor, full of spindle-legged gilt furniture upholstered in flowered silk. Also the room contained an ebony grand piano, and a bookcase, in which he had time to notice the works of Maupassant and Marie Corelli.
Then Miss Lewis entered, clad in a morning-gown of crimson “liberty”. She was _petite_ and exquisite, full of alluring dimples--and apparently just out of a perfumed bath. Thyrsis sat on the edge of his chair and gazed at her, feeling quite out of his element.
She placed herself on the flowered silk sofa and talked. “I am immensely interested in that play,” she said. “It is _quite_ unique. And you are so young, too--why, you seem just a boy. Really, you know I think you must be a genius yourself.”
Thyrsis murmured something, feeling uncomfortable.
“The only thing is,” Miss Lewis went on, “it will need a lot of revision to make it practical.”
“The love-story, principally,” said the other. “You see, in that respect, you have simply thrown your chances away.”
“You have made your hero act so queerly. Everyone feels that he is in love with Helena--you meant him to be, didn’t you? And yet he goes away from her and won’t see her! Everyone will be disappointed at that--it’s impossible, from every point of view. You’ll have to have them married in the last act.”