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Rh Howard's most engaging manner was on display. "Ken," he said, "frankly you are here because you have believed in me. I'm a novice no longer. I've had two conspicuous successes. I'm not looking toward this season. I'm pointing westward, as you might say, to the horizon. A distant goal. And so you. You'll be a star."

This talk, Ken thought, was not to the point. Why must he fence? Why parry? Why not coldly admit the truth that his interest was no longer professional or even personal. More like the macabre ghoulish efforts of a vivisectionist, cutting into, probing into a dog's corpse. Hadn't he made it plain? The affair was through. True enough, he himself had avoided an open break. For, after all, Howard Vee was not a perverted monomaniac. He was not of the sort who whips himself into a frenzy or drinks himself to an orgiastic state of rare exaltation. Howard was—Ken told himself—his victim. Howard had been his prey. Yet how speak of the unspeakable? What could he say?

As these thoughts troubled Ken, Howard eloquently pleaded his case. He concluded with a simple statement:

"If you are worried because of me, forget it. I shall be too busy to think … of those things."

Autumn tinged New York with magic blue, high skies, into which the skyscrapers towered. In the Alcazar Theatre Howard Vee toiled, struggled with his company. Alert mornings, tedious afternoons, weary evenings, broken by difficult production problems, passed in slow succession. Occasionally the Farraguts added to his burden. They were difficult to satisfy. They seemed to consider this American engagement as an interlude of condescension. Arrogant