“Perhaps you have your own widow and child?” Hollinger suggested with a laugh.
Then they went into the library, which the fight-trust man looked at with much interest.
“Would you like to see the house?” Brainard asked good-naturedly, always proud to show off his beloved theater.
“Above everything! I’ve read so much about it.”
Brainard conducted Hollinger over the building, explaining to him his purposes in making it more than a mere auditorium with a stage. Hollinger admired generously and intelligently all that he saw. As they came out at last in the darkened auditorium where the new play was still being read, he remarked to his host:
“I am very much obliged. It is all extremely interesting, a kind of kindergarten for the drama. Is this one of your products?” he nodded towards the stage.
“It’s Farson’s new play. We have high hopes for it!” Brainard said.
“Well, hurry up with it. I suppose you won’t be running theaters for amusement after—er—the event?”
“If you find that you want to get rid of this place, let me know, will you?”
“I might find a use for it. . . . I believe Miss Walters has ambitions to be a real star with her own theater. That is more _chic_ these days than owning a copper mine, and she will need occupation.”
“So that was another of your reasons for this call?” Brainard suggested with a laugh.
“She might take you on as manager—how would that do?”
“I’ll discuss it with her personally, when the time comes!”
“I shall advise her to let you manage the mine instead!” Hollinger retorted, after listening to another of Farson’s rather flamboyant periods. “I think she and I have better notions of what the ‘People’ like.”
With a last smile he slowly sauntered towards the exit, where he paused long enough to catch a few more of the speeches in _Her Great Adventure_, which seemed to cause him unhappiness.
“Oh, Lord!” he murmured, and rushed for the door.
As the big, pot-bellied steamship was being slowly pushed into her berth, Brainard, standing at the end of the pier, fancied that he could recognize two little figures on the upper deck. These feminine figures, rather eccentrically dressed, were evidently the knot of a laughing, joking circle of American men, all exhilarated by their approaching return to their beloved city. When the great black hull threw its shadow over the dock, one of the little figures waved both arms.