In spite of this balm to her vanity, Joan flushed with chagrin. She knew in her heart that Marbridge had not other than inadvertently slighted her; yet she felt the cut as keenly as though it had been grossly intentional.
Nevertheless she waited there for many minutes more, in the hope that he would return and this time know her.
At length, however, she saw the two men again, at some distance, standing by the revolving doors at the Thirty-third Street entrance. Both now wore top-coats and hats. Marbridge was still talking, and Arlington listening with the same expression of faintly constrained but on the whole genuine amusement. And almost as soon as Joan discovered them, they were joined by two women in brilliant evening gowns and wraps. An instant later the party was feeding itself into the inappeasable hopper of the revolving door, and so disappeared.
A prey to a sudden sensation of intense loneliness and disappointment--and with this a trace of jealousy; for in spite of the distance she had been able to see that both women were very lovely--Joan got up and returned to her room....
An hour later she rose from a restless attempt to go to sleep, went to the telephone and asked the switchboard operator to find out whether or not Mr. Vincent Marbridge was a guest of the hotel.
The answer was in the affirmative, if modified by the information that the party wasn't in just then.
Intensely gratified, the girl went back to bed and promptly fell asleep formulating ingenious schemes to meet Marbridge by ostensible accident.
On the following day she lunched at the hotel, spent two fruitless hours in its public corridors between tea time and time to dress for dinner, and another in Peacock Alley after dinner, seeing nothing whatever of Marbridge.
And the day after provided her with a fatiguing repetition of this experience.
She began to be tremendously bored by this mode of existence, to sense the emptiness, the vapidity of hotel life for a friendless woman.
Once or twice she revived and let her fancy play about her project to revisit her family in the guise of Lady Bountiful, but only to defer its execution against the time when she could go to them with another engagement to drive home the stupendous proportions of her success.