While the letter to Gashwiler composed itself, with especially clear directions about where the return money should be sent, he was also warning himself to remain throughout the day at a safe distance from the door of the cafeteria.

He had proved the wisdom of this even the day before that had started with a bounteous breakfast.

To-day the aroma of cooked food occasionally wafted from the cafeteria door would prove, he was sure, to be more than he could bear.
He rather shunned the stages to-day, keeping more to himself.

The collar, he had to confess, was no longer, even to the casual eye, what a successful screen-actor's collar should be.

The sprouting beard might still be misconstrued as the whim of a director sanctified to realism--every day it was getting to look more like that--but no director would have commanded the wearing of such a collar except in actual work where it might have been a striking detail in the apparel of an underworldling, one of those creatures who became the tools of rich but unscrupulous roues who are bent upon the moral destruction of beautiful young screen heroines.