“Ever take an actress out to supper before?”
“No,” said Horace miserably, “and I never will again. I don’t know why I came to-night. Here under all these lights and with all these people laughing and chattering I feel completely out of my sphere. I don’t know what to talk to you about.”
“We’ll talk about me. We talked about you last time.”
“Very well.”
“Well, my name really is Meadow, but my first name isn’t Marcia—it’s Veronica. I’m nineteen. Question—how did the girl make her leap to the footlights? Answer—she was born in Passaic, New Jersey, and up to a year ago she got the right to breathe by pushing Nabiscoes in Marcel’s tea-room in Trenton. She started going with a guy named Robbins, a singer in the Trent House cabaret, and he got her to try a song and dance with him one evening. In a month we were filling the supper-room every night. Then we went to New York with meet-my-friend letters thick as a pile of napkins.
“In two days we’d landed a job at Divinerries’, and I learned to shimmy from a kid at the Palais Royal. We stayed at Divinerries’ six months until one night Peter Boyce Wendell, the columnist, ate his milk-toast there. Next morning a poem about Marvellous Marcia came out in his newspaper, and within two days I had three vaudeville offers and a chance at the Midnight Frolic. I wrote Wendell a thank-you letter, and he printed it in his column—said that the style was like Carlyle’s, only more rugged, and that I ought to quit dancing and do North American literature. This got me a coupla more vaudeville offers and a chance as an ingénue in a regular show. I took it—and here I am, Omar.”
When she finished they sat for a moment in silence, she draping the last skeins of a Welsh rabbit on her fork and waiting for him to speak.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said suddenly.
Marcia’s eyes hardened.
“What’s the idea? Am I making you sick?”
“No, but I don’t like it here. I don’t like to be sitting here with you.”
Without another word Marcia signalled for the waiter.
“What’s the check?” she demanded briskly. “My part—the rabbit and the ginger ale.”
Horace watched blankly as the waiter figured it.
“See here,” he began, “I intended to pay for yours too. You’re my guest.”
With a half-sigh Marcia rose from the table and walked from the room. Horace, his face a document in bewilderment, laid a bill down and followed her out, up the stairs and into the lobby. He overtook her in front of the elevator and they faced each other.
“See here,” he repeated, “you’re my guest. Have I said something to offend you?”
After an instant of wonder Marcia’s eyes softened.
“You’re a rude fella,” she said slowly. “Don’t you know you’re rude?”
“I can’t help it,” said Horace with a directness she found quite disarming. “You know I like you.”
“You said you didn’t like being with me.”
“I didn’t like it.”
“Why not?” Fire blazed suddenly from the gray forests of his eyes.
“Because I didn’t. I’ve formed the habit of liking you. I’ve been thinking of nothing much else for two days.”
“Well, if you——”
“Wait a minute,” he interrupted. “I’ve got something to say. It’s this: in six weeks I’ll be eighteen years old. When I’m eighteen years old I’m coming up to New York to see you. Is there some place in New York where we can go and not have a lot of people in the room?”
“Sure!” smiled Marcia. “You can come up to my ’partment. Sleep on the couch, if you want to.”
“I can’t sleep on couches,” he said shortly. “But I want to talk to you.”
“Why, sure,” repeated Marcia—“in my ’partment.”
In his excitement Horace put his hands in his pockets.
“All right—just so I can see you alone. I want to talk to you as we talked up in my room.”
“Honey boy,” cried Marcia, laughing, “is it that you want to kiss me?”
“Yes,” Horace almost shouted. “I’ll kiss you if you want me to.”
The elevator man was looking at them reproachfully. Marcia edged toward the grated door.
“I’ll drop you a post-card,” she said.
Horace’s eyes were quite wild.
“Send me a post-card! I’ll come up any time after January first. I’ll be eighteen then.”
And as she stepped into the elevator he coughed enigmatically, yet with a vague challenge, at the ceiling, and walked quickly away.
III.
He was there again. She saw him when she took her first glance at the restless Manhattan audience—down in the front row with his head bent a bit forward and his gray eyes fixed on her. And she knew that to him they were alone together in a world where the high-rouged row of ballet faces and the massed whines of the violins were as imperceivable as powder on a marble Venus. An instinctive defiance rose within her.
“Silly boy!” she said to herself hurriedly, and she didn’t take her encore.
“What do they expect for a hundred a week—perpetual motion?” she grumbled to herself in the wings.
“What’s the trouble, Marcia?”
“Guy I don’t like down in front.”
During the last act as she waited for her specialty she had an odd attack of stage fright. She had never sent Horace the promised post-card. Last night she had pretended not to see him—had hurried from the theatre immediately after her dance to pass a sleepless night in her apartment, thinking—as she had so often in the last month—of his pale, rather intent face, his slim, boyish figure, the merciless, unworldly abstraction that made him charming to her.
And now that he had come she felt vaguely sorry—as though an unwonted responsibility was being forced on her.
“Infant prodigy!” she said aloud.
“What?” demanded the negro comedian standing beside her.
“Nothing—just talking about myself.”
On the stage she felt better. This was her dance—and she always felt that the way she did it wasn’t suggestive any more than to some men every pretty girl is suggestive. She made it a stunt.
“Uptown, downtown, jelly
