“Oh, sir!” murmured Kim, gratefully.
“Cultivate it, is my advice. And when she smiles! . . . Boy! I work like a dawg to get her to smile whenever I see her. She thinks I’m one of those cut-ups. I’m really a professional suicide at heart, but I’d wiggle my ears if it would win one of those slow, dazzling——”
“Listen! Who—or whom—are you interviewing, young man? Me or my mama?”
“She around?”
“No. She’s at the Shaw opening with Ken.”
“Well, then, you’ll do.”
“Just for that I think I’ll turn elegant on you and not grant any more interviews. Maude Adams never did. Look at Mrs. Fiske! And Duse. Anyway, interviews always sound so dumb when they appear in print. Dignified silence is the thing. Mystery. Everybody knows too much about the stage, nowadays.”
“Believe me, I do!” said the young second-assistant dramatic critic, in a tone of intense acerbity.
A neat little triple tap at the dressing-room door. “Curtain already!” exclaimed Kim in a kind of panic. You would have thought this was her first stage summons. Another hasty application with the rabbit’s foot.
A mulatto girl in black silk so crisp, and white batiste cap and apron so correct that she might have doubled as stage and practical maid, now opened the door outside which she had been discreetly stationed. “Curtain, Blanche?”