Besides (she told herself) they seemed to be worrying along without her, all right. If they cared anything about her, they could have written, at least; Edna had the West Forty-sixth Street address....
Not once or twice but many a time and oft she found herself yearning back to the homely society of the Sisters Dean's salon in the establishment of Madame Duprat. And though she held back from revisiting the house through fear of meeting Matthias, she wasted many an hour promenading Broadway from Thirty-eighth Street north to Forty-eighth, in the hope of encountering Maizie or May or one of their friends.
But it was singularly her fate to espy not one familiar face among the multitude her wistful eyes reviewed during those dreary mid-afternoon patrols.
Everybody she knew, it would seem, was either busy or resting out of town.
On her fourth morning at the Waldorf, reading _The Morning Telegraph_ over the breakfast tray in her room, Joan ran across an illuminating news item that carried a Buffalo date line. It chronicled the first performance of Arlington's most recent venture, "Mrs. Mixer," announced as a satirical comedy of manners by an author unknown either to Joan or to fame, and projected by Arlington as a vehicle to exploit the putative talents of Nella Cardrow, "the stage's latest recruit from the Four Hundred." The Buffalo performance was, it appeared, the first of a fortnight's trial on the road, following which the production was to be withdrawn pending a metropolitan début in the Autumn.
The story of the first night was infused with a thinly sarcastic humour.
"After the final curtain," it pursued, "the audience filed reverently from the house, omitting flowers, and Arlie Arlington broke a track record reaching the nearest Western Union office to summon several well-known ante-mortem specialists of New York to the bedside of the patient. Meanwhile, Vincent Marbridge was hastily organized into a posse of one to prevent Undertaker Cain from laying hands upon the sufferer and carting it off to what might prove premature interment in the mausoleum of his celebrated storage warehouses...."
Dropping the paper, Joan went directly to the telephone and asked the office to have her bill ready within an hour's time.