Did any lad ever have more fair-weather friends than this one? And did any lad ever find himself more completely alone when the breaks turned bad for him? I know. Platitudes, everyone says when stuff such as this is gotten off. Everybody knows that the flies swarm around the sugar bowl and not the vinegar jar. I don’t pretend to be a philosopher, but it seems to me that the case of Bob McKay is a sad and embittering commentary on our so-called civilization. If this is the way it is with human beings, will somebody please tell me what it’s all worth?

Among the many thousands who read this bit was Terry Stafford, an ever-lovely Terry Stafford, but for the past few days a little pallid, a little tense and jumpy, torn between conflicting desires. A world, a whole phase of her life, had seemed to tumble down in fragments about her well-shaped head when she had first read in the newspapers that a seamy derelict named Bob McKay who had once been a personality in the entertainment world was charged with the brutal murder of a Main Street B-girl named Doris Blair.

Terry’s first impulse had been to rush to the prison where McKay was being held, fall on her knees and weep with her lover for the miserable wreck they had made of their lives and of the love that once had been. But the mood passed quickly as she came to the realization that it wouldn’t do any good whatsoever if she did go to McKay…even if she could somehow make herself forget that he had stubbornly refused to compromise a little, even for the sake of their mutual happiness…even if he would forget that she had been the one to cast him adrift as hopeless and beyond redemption because his strength, the drive that had put him where he was, seemed to have left him for good.

Visiting him could do him no good…poor, helpless Bob, she thought. And although she hated and despised herself for thinking it, she knew that the visit could do her a lot of harm. Why should she allow a thing that was better left in the discard heap, the battered and castoff love she had had for McKay once in the past, to stand between her and a driving ambition that alone might be able to serve as a substitute for what she had once wanted?

Jack Colin would put her across. She knew it for a fact. All she needed to do was to play her hand properly, and Colin would do anything she wanted him to do for her. He would build her up into the glittering star she craved to be. To allow her name to get mixed up in a sordid and brutal murder case at this stage would be to finish the career she wanted even before it had a chance to get started.