This time Barbara looked at Betty, who blushed and murmured, “I didn’t suppose she could act very much. I really didn’t.”
Mr. Masters laughed heartily at this. “Well, she seems to be a thorough mystery,” he said. “And now the only question is where we need her most, in case I don’t like your first choice in Portias any better than I did your Shylocks. We ought to have these other people in, I suppose. Of course there’s no question about Miss Lewis, but we’d better know what they can all do, especially if there are any more of Miss Wales’s dark horses among them.”
“WELL, WE’VE FOUND OUR SHYLOCK,” HE SAID.
By dinner time the astonishing news had spread over the campus. Roberta Lewis was going to be Shylock. She hadn’t been in but one play since she entered college and then she took somebody’s place. Nobody had thought she would get it. Nobody knew she could act except Betty Wales. Betty found out about her somehow—she was always finding out what people could do,—and she got her in at the last minute because Mr. Masters didn’t like Jean’s acting,—or somebody didn’t. Roberta’s was magnificent. They wanted her for Portia too. Mr. Masters had said it was a great pity there weren’t two of her. How did she take it? Why, she acted shy and bored and distant, just as usual. She seemed to have expected to be Shylock!
But she wasn’t “just as usual.” She was sitting by her window in the dark, with Mary Brooks’s picture clutched tightly in one hand and her father’s in the other, and she was whispering soft little messages to them.
“Dear old daddy, you were in all the fraternities and societies, and on all the college papers and the ’varsity eight. Well, I’m on one thing now. You’ll have one little chance to be proud of me, perhaps, after all these four years.
“Now, Mary Brooks, do you see what I can do? I couldn’t write and I couldn’t be popular or prominent or a ‘star’ in any of the classes. I’m not that kind. But after all I shall be something but just one of the Clan before I leave.
“Oh, I wonder if Mary and father would like to sit together at the play.”