“I don’t think Miss Tremayne comes on till Act Three,” said the author.
“We sha’n’t get there for another two hours,” the producer growled.
Miss Tremayne moved her chair back three feet, and turned to finish her conversation with Sylvia.
“What I was going to say when I was interrupted, dear, was that, if you’re a bad sailor, you ought to make a point of making friends with the purser. Unfortunately I don’t know the purser on the Minneworra, but the purser on the Minnetoota was quite a friend of mine, and gave me a beautiful deck-cabin. The other girls were very jealous.”
“Damn it, Miss Tremayne, didn’t I ask you not to go on talking?” the producer shouted.
“Nice gentlemanly way of asking anybody not to whisper a few words of advice, isn’t it?” said Miss Tremayne, with a scathing glance at Mr. Fortescue as she moved her chair quite six feet farther away from the scene.
“Now, of course, we’re in a draught,” she grumbled to Sylvia. “But I always say that producers never have any consideration for anybody but themselves.”
By the time the S.S. Minneworra reached New York Sylvia had come to the conclusion that the representatives of the legitimate drama differed only from the chorus of a musical comedy in taking their temperaments and exits more seriously. Sylvia’s earlier experience had led her to suppose that the quantity of make-up and proximity to the footlights were the most important things in art.
Whatever hopes of individual ability to shine the company might have cherished before it reached New York were quickly dispelled by the two American stars, up to whom and not with whom they were expected to twinkle. Mr. Diomed Olver and Miss Marcia Neville regarded the rest of the company as Jupiter and Venus might regard the Milky Way. Miss Tremayne’s exit upon a slammed door was forbidden the first time she tried it, because it would distract the attention of the audience from Miss Neville, who at that moment would be sustaining a dimple, which she called holding a situation. This dimple, which was famous from Boston to San Francisco, from Buffalo to New Orleans, had, when Miss Neville first swam into the ken of a manager’s telescope, been easy enough to sustain. Of late years a slight tendency toward stoutness had made it necessary to assist the dimple with the forefinger and internal suction; the slamming of a door might disturb so nice an operation, and an appeal, which came oddly from Miss Neville, was made to Miss Tremayne’s sense of natural acting.
Mr. Olver did not bother to conceal his intention of never moving from the center of the stage, where he maintained himself with the noisy skill of a gyroscope.