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WILL CONRAD MARRY
Former marriages brought grief to both of them. Now
BY DORA ALBERT
THE first time Mary Courtland saw Conrad Thibault a great wave of unhappiness swept over her. She couldn't understand it. The boy was singing for a gay group of guests at Bill Stuhler's. The place was full of radio celebrities, which is just what you'd expect at Christmas Eve at Bill's place, for Bill is head of a radio department. Outside it was bitter cold, but inside there was a warm hearth-fire, and only a moment ago the air had been filled with a kind of radiant bappiness.
Now Conrad sang a simple song: "The Day Is Done," and the very air of the room seemed filled with a kind of melancholy.
Was it the song that had awakened this strange mood in her, Mary wondered, or was it something about Conrad, some brooding unhappiness that was in his heart and had somehow been transferred to hers ?
Impatiently she tried to shake off the thought, but there it was. And there it remained all evening. Even when she and Don Vorhees, the orchestra leader, and Conrad gathered together before the piano and laughingly tried to compose a mad little song, "In the Middle of the Night," even while their laughter rang through the rooms, an undercurrent of sadness kept welling into her heart.
But for Conrad the evening was quite different. It had started off miserably, for it was his first
Christmas since the death of his wife, Madeleine. But though he had entered the room with the burden of the pain he had been carrying in his heart, he shook it off that evening. Suddenly he felt light-hearted and gay, as he hadn't felt for many, many months.
For a long time he had brooded over the death of Madeleine, his child-wife, just when he was on the threshold of success. What a crazy-quilt pattern fate wove, he thought bitterly, depriving him of the girl he loved just when he might have given her some of the luxuries for which they had fought and struggled and starved.
Never, he told himself, would he love another woman as he had loved Madeleine, for where was there a woman with her simplicity and sincerity? His lips curved in a bitter smile as he thought of the women he had met on Radio Row, gold-diggers, self-seekers, women who would trample over anything or anybody to get ahead.
And though Mary Courtland, with her midnight black hair and her dark eyes, looked startlingly lovely that night, it never occurred to Conrad to seek her out. He had learned that she was a radio singer, ambitious, he supposed, ready to use every feminine wile to get ahead. Well, he wouldn't help her! He knew the kind too well, these girls who hid their ruthlessness under a shy manner.
Afterward he met Mary occasionally, when she was rehearsing for some radio program. And he'd say: "Hello, how are you?" and let it go at that. Oh, no, he had no interest in the girl at all.
Suddenly it was June. The skies over Manhattan's soaring towers were a symphony in blue. The sunlight
Last winter brought the thrill of sleighing through the city streets.
Summer finds them relaxing happily together at a charming beach resort.
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