Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/405

 replied oracularly: "You know more about it than I do." Subsequently, Don heard that she had "gone on the road." Finally, he read in a dramatic paper that she was leading woman in a San Francisco stock company; and he wrote to her. But he did not understand her part much less her purpose—in bringing about the events that had led up to his hasty marriage; and he did not understand why she had fallen back into that strange silence of life from which she had so suddenly emerged upon him.

He moved to a little, uptown, top-floor flat which Margaret and he furnished "on the instalment plan," dignifying the tiny front room with a rented piano for her and a library writing-table for him. She was to practise her music while he wrote on his plays. They settled down to that dual programme of ambitious work, happy in their nest under the eaves. Walter Pittsey became a frequent visitor, and Margaret encouraged him to come, because he tried to aid and advise Don in his play-writing. He even endeavoured to interest Polk in one of Don's manuscripts, and was not surprised to find that Polk—though he pronounced the play itself "awful stuff, awful"—was puzzled and amused by Don as if by a new specimen of young human nature to be studied and perhaps reproduced. He drew Don out, at their odd meetings in the box office, professed to see possibilities in Don's "Winter" as a sort of spectacular extravaganza, asked him to write it out, and quizzed him, with the soberest countenance, about his views of life. Only to Pittsey, Polk confessed: "I don't believe he'll write a play, if he lives to be a thousand."

"Why not?"