"My God! I thought she didn't understand English!"
"She doesn't. But she's a woman. Not only that, she's a French woman. They don't need to know a language to understand it."
"Where did you get that, h'm? That wasn't included in your Berlitz course, was it?"
Wallie Ascher had grinned—that winning flash lighting up his dark, keen face. "No. I learned that in another school."
Wallie Ascher's early career in the theatre, if repeated here, might almost be a tiresome repetition of Hahn's beginning. And what Augustin Daly had been to Sid Hahn's imagination and ambition, Sid Hahn was to Wallie's. Wallie, though, had been born to the theatre—if having a tumbler for a father and a prestidigitator's foil for a mother can be said to be a legitimate entrance into the world of the theatre.
He had been employed about the old Thalia for years before Hahn noticed him. In the beginning he was a spindle-legged office boy in the upstairs suite of the firm of Hahn & Lohman, theatrical producers; the kind of office-boy who is addicted to shrill, clear whistling unless very firmly dealt with. No one in the outer office realized how faultless, how rhythmic were the arpeggios and cadences that issued from those expertly puckered lips. There was about his performance an unerring precision. As you listened you felt that his ascent to the inevitable high note was a thing impossible of achievement. Up—up—up he would go, while you held your breath in suspense. And then he took the high note—took it easily, insouciantly—held it, trilled it, tossed it.
"Now, look here," Miss Feldman would snap—Miss Feldman of the outer office typewriter—"look here, you kid. Any more of that bird warbling and you go back to the woods where you belong. This ain't a—a—"
"Aviary," suggested Wallie, almost shyly.
Miss Feldman glared. "How did you know that word?"
"I don't know," helplessly. "But it's the word, isn't it?"