"There! That's all right, then, I trust you. Yes, I just will, J. J., so there! I guess I have a right to my say in this show, haven't I?"
J. J. answered by a shrug of the shoulders, but it was a shrug of resentful acquiescence, and showed that he acknowledged his wife's supremacy—the eternal supremacy of the Golden Calf.
"Sit down, and make yourself at home," went on Miss Moon, smiling on the handsome young man, who was not much older than her sons. "Full Moon" was her nickname in the company, and Loveland thought, as she cordially indicated a chair by the stove, that her figure merited the sobriquet.
"I know you're a great friend of Lillie's," the lady slily began again, when she and Loveland were seated near the fire, and J. J. had drowned himself in a theatrical paper. "But all the same, you must admit that her acting gets worse every day. She's so awful careless! And she's failed to go down with audiences here. We've done rotten business."
"The house has seemed good every night," said Loveland.
"Ah, it's seemed all right; but it's been half paper. It's mighty discouragin', for me and Mr. Jacobus, I can tell you, after the money I've put into the show, and the work he's put in. The fact is, it's so discouragin' we're thinkin' of makin' a change; breakin' up the company, in a way, and then startin' again, with only the ones we really want in a new crowd. Would you like to join?"
Loveland looked her straight in the face, with almost brutally frank disapproval on his. The extra touches she had given to her hair, and eyelashes, and complexion for his benefit, were all in vain. She might have been a block of painted wood, for any admiration in his eyes.
"You mean, you're going to send Miss de Lisle away?" he asked.
"We're going to send ourselves away from her," Miss Moon corrected him.
"Leaving her in the lurch!" exclaimed Loveland; with that uncompromising truthfulness of his which was a virtue or a vice, according as one had reason to regard it.