ways been the grain of humility, fiercely hidden from the world, which made her in spite of everything an artist.
The voice of Rebecca, shrewd and sleek with her success as an "exploitress," sounded in her ear.
"Here's the motor. . . . We'll be late and the others will have arrived without you." (Always hustling . . . Rebecca . . . always pushing from one thing to another.)
César, for all his hopes, had not yet lost her. At that very moment the house in the Rue Raynouard was filled with people whom Schneidermann and Rebecca had called in . . . actresses, writers, rich bankers with a fancy for art, musicians, perhaps even a demi-mondaine or two . . . all the rag, tag and bobtail gathered from a dozen cities of Europe. What was she doing among them? She? Ellen Tolliver? Had she lost possession of herself?—that precious self she had guarded always with such secrecy?
It was not Ellen Tolliver who was going to this noisy party. It was Lilli Barr, a creature who had been made out of nothing. Ellen Tolliver would have gone to her room and wept a little over her loneliness.
The voice of Rebecca again. . . .
"Ravel is coming to-night. He wants to speak with you about the new suite he has done. . . . It is important. Be nice to him."
It was all a long way from Walker's Pond.
For two years she lived, thus, almost in public, sustained always by the glorious vitality descended to her from Hattie Tolliver and guided by Rebecca who allowed her to miss no opportunity. She was tireless. She appeared everywhere. Yet there was a remoteness about her which none penetrated, save perhaps Callendar whose dark face appeared now and then in the back of some concert hall, now in Paris, now in London, now in Rome, wherever his path chanced to cross that of Lilli Barr. Sometimes as she came upon the stage she caught a fleeting glimpse of him, watching her as he had watched on that first awful evening in
