“Hello, sweetie,” a buxom maiden near the door sang out when she observed the newcomer. “What line of talk are you goin’ to give us? The last guy as was here asked us if our souls was saved. Is that the dope you’ve got up your sleeve?”
Roberta smiled so frankly that she seemed to disarm their fears that they were to be preached to. “I say,” she began, as she sat on a trunk near the door, “do you all like this life?”
Another girl whirled about and, pausing in the process of applying a lip stick, she winked wisely at the one who had first spoken. “Say, Pink,” she called, “I got’er spotted. She’s an ink-slinger for some daily.”
“Wrong you are,” Bobs merrily replied. Then she turned to a slender girl who was standing at the mirror next to her, who had appeared quite indifferent to the newcomer’s presence. “How is it with you?” Roberta asked her directly. “Do you like this life?”
But it was one of the bolder girls who replied: “Sure thing, we all like the life. It’s great.”
“Goin’ to join the high kicks?” This question was asked by still another girl who, having completed her toilet, now sauntered up and stood directly in front of Bobs. For one moment the young detective’s heart beat rapidly, for the newcomer’s resemblance to the picture was striking, but another girl was saying: “Bee, there, has been with this here show for two years, and she likes the life, don’t you, Bee?”
So, after all, this wasn’t the one whom she sought.
Bobs decided to take them into her confidence. Smiling around in the winning way that she had, she began: “Girls, you’ve had three guesses and missed, so now I’ll put you wise. I’m looking for a Winifred Waring-Winston, whose mamma-dear wishes to see her at once, if not sooner. Can you tell me at which theater I can find her?”
The others grouped about Roberta, but all shook their heads. “Dunno as I’d squeal on her if I did know,” said the one called Pink. “But as it happens, I don’t.”
Nor did the others, it would seem, and when Roberta was convinced that Winnie was not to be found there, she left, but, as the curtain had raised on the first scene, she paused near the front door to hear Miss Merryheart sing. Truly she was an actress, Bobs thought, for no one in that vast audience who saw the star could have guessed that only a brief time before there had been tears in those dark-lashed eyes that now seemed to be brimming with mirth.