“Curtain, Miss Ravenal!”
She went swiftly toward the door.
“Can I do anything? Fetch your mother from the theatre?”
“She’ll be back here with Ken after the play. Half an hour. No use——”
He followed her as she went swiftly toward the door from which she made her third-act entrance. “I don’t want to be offensive, Miss Ravenal. But if there’s a story in this—your grandmother, I mean—eighty, you know——”
Over her shoulder, in a whisper, “There is. See Ken.” She stood a moment; seemed to set her whole figure; relaxed it then; vanished. You heard her lovely but synthetic voice as the American wife of the English husband in the opening lines of the third act:
“I’m so sick of soggy British breakfast. Devilled kidneys! Ugh! Who but the English could face food so visceral at nine A. M.!”
She was thinking as she played the third act for the three hundredth time that she must tuck the telegram under a cold cream jar or back of her mirror as soon as she returned to her dressing room. What if Magnolia should take it into her head to leave the Shaw play early and find it there on her dressing table! She must tell her gently. Magnolia never had learned to take telegrams calmly. They always threw her into a panic. Ever since that one about Gaylord Ravenal’s death in San Francisco. Gaylord Ravenal. A lovely name. What a tin-horn sport he must have been. Charming though, probably.
Curtain. Bows. Curtain. Bows. Curtain. Bows. Curtain.
She was back in her dressing room, had removed her make-up, was almost dressed when Ken returned with her mother. She had made desperate haste, aided expertly by her maid.