confidence to have Georgiana behind him telling him what to do. In the future, with this adequate background to rely on, he could even imagine himself taking the offensive under certain conditions. Assuredly his defensive would never be so weak again.
A vague picture arose in his mind of the desirability of a lazy existence with Georgiana in some tropical clime, but he had not yet made this ideal concrete. It was, to be sure, essentially the life they were leading at present. Georgiana was free until Dick Ruby commenced work on his next picture, and free even after that if she carried out her threat to break her contract, an easy matter as she was under age when she signed it. They had not, however, discussed the future. What with the money Ambrose was making from his play—now being performed by two companies—and the money he would get for his picture, to say nothing of the ample cheque presented to him by his father-in-law, he foresaw no occasion to worry about his financial condition. Any whim that Georgiana cared to indulge might easily be gratified.
So, first in the great hotel in Santa Barbara and later in a smaller hotel in another town on the coast of Southern California, the idyl prolonged itself, the
