She chuckled, and patted her bag where the bill fold lay, with its crisp hundreds due to some imitation of creative impulse.
“Just where, and in what, am I lacking?” she asked, most humbly.
“A creative artist would not care a fig for truth. He creates an impression of truth out of a lie if necessary.”
“But I am in the direct line from Ananias,” she protested. “I inherit creative talent of that brand.”
So they laughed and chattered, in the first real companionship they had ever known.
True to the plan, they ascended the stage at Eighteenth Street, Bambi in a flutter of happiness. As the panorama of that most fascinating highway unrolled before them, she constantly touched this and that and the other object with the wand of her vivid imagination. Jarvis watched her with amused astonishment, for the first time really thoroughly aware of her. Again he noticed that wherever she was she was a lodestone for all eyes. He decided that it was not beauty, in the strictest sense of the word, but a sort of radiance which emanated from her like an aura.
Twenty-third Street cut across their path with
