"Who is she, Dicky?" I tried to make my voice careless. "I did not catch her name when you introduced us."
"You'll probably see enough of her so you won't forget it," returned Dicky, grinning. "She's one of the busiest little members of the 'Welcome to Our City Committee' in the set I train most with. She won't rest till you've met all the boys and girls and been properly lionized. She's one of the best little scouts going, and, if she'd cut out the war paint and modulate that Comanche yell she calls her voice there would be few women to equal her for brains or looks."
"But you haven't told me yet what her name is," I persisted.
"Well, in private life she's Mrs. Harry Underwood—that's Harry with her—but she's better known all over the country as the cleverest producer of illustrated jingles for advertising we have. Remember that Simple Simon parody for the mincemeat advertisement we laughed over some time ago, and I told you I knew the woman who did it? There she is before you," and Dicky waved his hand grandiloquently.
"Lillian Gale!" I almost gasped the name.
"The same," rejoined Dicky, and turned again to his program, while I sat in amazed horror, with all my oldtime theories crumbling around me.
For I had read of Lillian Gale and her married troubles. I knew that Harry Underwood was her second husband and that she had been divorced from her first spouse after a scandal which has been aired quite fully in the newspapers. She had not been proved guilty, but her skirts certainly had been smirched by rumor. According to the ideas which had been mine, Dicky should have shrunk from having me ever meet such a woman, let alone planning to have me on terms of intimacy with her.
What should I do?
When the curtain went down on the first act I turned to Dicky happily, eager to hear his comments and filled with a throng of thoughts to wipe away any remembrance from his mind of the unhappiness that had promised to mar my evening, and which I feared he had read in my eyes. But just as I opened my lips to speak, he interrupted me with a startled exclamation:
"Sit down, Lil. Hello, Harry."