The judge made up for it, however, by giving the defendant a stiff little lecture before dismissing the case, expressing his surprise that the husband of so young and pretty a wife should care to pass the early morning hours at poker and fisticuffs. Adair accepted the rebuke with great good nature and prompted by his wife thanked his honor for his forbearance, adding to the general hilarity by repeating aloud some of the advice that was being whispered in his ear. Apologies followed outside, and the whole party returned to their hotel in the same hack. All’s well that ends well!
Adair waited until Christmas before severing his connection with Steinberger. The holidays were bad for theatrical business, and the prospect of a temporarily reduced salary and several extra matinées seemed to make this period an auspicious one for departure. With two hundred and eighty dollars, their trunks, the clothes they stood in, and hearts beating high with eagerness and hope, the pair took the train for the City of Success.
Even on their way to it their respective positions began to change. The actor, for all his broad shoulders and big voice and commanding presence, betrayed from the first a helplessness and dependence that both pleased and surprised his little wife. He anxiously deferred to her in everything; fell in readily with every suggestion; listened with profound respect to her plans. He knew New York inside out; poverty was no stranger to him, nor the makeshifts and struggles of the poor; yet in the crisis of their fortunes it was the girl that took the lead--the girl who had never suffered a single privation in her life, who had been reared in luxury, to whom money and ease were as the air she breathed.
Left to his own unguided will Adair would have gravitated to a dingy bedroom in a dingy boarding-house. It was Phyllis who perceived the greater freedom, and the unspeakably greater comfort and charm of a tiny apartment. The nest-making instinct was strong in her, and also the bred-in-the-bone belief that it was the woman’s place to guard her man’s well-being, and to send him forth to work in the best of trim. She did not know how to cook; she had never swept out a room in her life, she had never even folded a table-cloth, yet her self-assurance and determination never wavered. All this could be learned--pooh, it only needed hard work and intelligence,--she would answer for its being the nicest little flat in New York, and would dismiss Adair every morning in his best clothes, smiling, well-fed, and happy, to look for an engagement.