“Your David!” Sally’s heart repeated the words, sang them, crooned over them, but she did not answer, except with one of her rare, sudden, sweet smiles.
“Nita evidently thinks so, too,” the weak little treble went on, as “Pitty Sing” trotted toward her cot, looking like an animated doll. “I might as well warn you right now, Sally, that I don’t trust that Nita person as far as I can throw a bull by the horns.”
She flung her dire pronouncement over a tiny, pink-silk shoulder as she knelt before a small metal trunk and reached into her bosom for a key suspended around her neck on a chain. Sally’s desire to laugh at the preposterous picture of the midget throwing a bull by the horns was throttled by a new and particularly horrid fear.
“What—do you mean, Betty?” she gasped. “Has Nita—”
“—been vamping your David?” tiny Miss Elizabeth Matilda Tanner finished her sentence for her. “It would not be Nita if she overlooked a prospect like your David. It is entirely obvious that he is a person of breeding and family, even if he is helping Buck in the ‘privilege’ car kitchen. Nita is always so broke that she has to eat her meals in the cook tent, but she borrowed or stole the money today to eat in the privilege car, and she found it necessary to confer with your David on a purely fictitious dietetic problem, and then went boldly into the kitchen to time the eggs he was boiling for her. That Nita!” the tiny voice snorted contemptuously. “She’s as strong as a horse and has about as much need for a special diet as an elephant has for galoshes. Oh, she’s up to her tricks, not a doubt about that. I just thought I’d warn you in time. Nita’s a man-eating tigress and once she’s smelled blood—”
“Thank you, Betty,” Sally interrupted gently, as she knelt beside the midget to help her with the lid of the trunk. “But David isn’t my David, you know. He’s—he’s just a friend who helped me out when I was in terrible trouble. If Nita likes David, and—he—likes her—”
“Don’t be absurd!” the midget scolded her, seating herself on a tiny stool to take off her baby-size shoes and stockings. “Of course you’re in love with him, and he’s crazy about you—a blind person could see that. Will you untie this shoe-lace, please? My nightgown is in the tray of the trunk, and you’ll find a nightcap there, too. I wear it,” she explained severely, on the defensive against ridicule, “to protect my marcel. Heaven knows it’s hard enough to get a good curl in these hick towns, with the rubes gaping at me wherever I go. Then please get my Ibsen—a little green leather book. I’m reading ‘Hedda Gabler’ now. Have you read it?”
“Oh, yes!” Sally cried, delightedly. “Do you like to read? Could I borrow it to read between shows? I’ll take awfully good care of it—”
“Certainly I read!” Miss Tanner informed her severely, climbing, with Sally’s help, into her low cot-bed. “My father, who had these little books made especially for me, was a university professor. I have completed the college course, under his tutelage. If he had not died I should not be here,” and her little eyes were suddenly bitter with loneliness and resentment against the whimsy of a Providence that elected to make her so different from other women.
Sally found the miniature book, small enough to fit the midget’s hand, and gave it to her, then stooped and kissed the little faded, wrinkled cheek and set about the difficult and unaccustomed task of removing her make-up. Beside her cot bed she found a small tin steamer trunk, stencilled in red paint with the magic name, “Princess Lalla.” She stared at it incredulously for a long minute, then untwisted the wire holding duplicate keys.