Page:Bambi (1914).djvu/109

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BAMBI
93

“Where are you going? Do you want to come?”

“No. I have something to attend to myself. Good luck.”

She held out her hand to him. He held it a second, looking at it as if it was a specimen of something hitherto unknown.

“I am not forgetting that you are giving me this chance,” he said, and left abruptly.

Bambi leaped about the rooms in a series of joy-leaps that would have shamed Mordkin, before she began the serious business of the day.

Jarvis had carefully looked up the exact location of the Belasco Theatre. He decided to walk uptown, in order to arrange his thoughts, and to make up his mind just how much and what he would say to Mr. Belasco. The stir, the people, the noise and the roar were unseen, unheard. He strolled along, towering above the crowd, a blond young Achilles, with many an admiring eye turned in his wake.

None of the perquisites of success, so dear to Bambi’s dreams, appealed to him. He saw himself, like John the Baptist, crying in the wilderness, which was the world, and all the people, in all the cities, were roused out of their lethargy and dull submission at his call—not to prayer, but to thought. It was