She appeared to be gaining on her incredulity, but a vestige of it remained. “I won’t touch it,” she declared with more spirit than could have been expected from the perishing, “I won’t touch it till you give me a good big kiss.”
“Sure,” he said, and leaned down to brush her pale cheek with his lips. He was cheerfully businesslike in this ceremony.
“Not till you do it right,” she persisted. He knelt beside the couch and did it right. He lingered with a hand upon her pale brow.
“What you afraid of?” he demanded.
“You,” she said, but now she again brought the watch to view, holding it away from her, studying its glitter from various angles. At last she turned her eyes up to his. They were alive but unrevealing. “Well?”
“Well?” he repeated coolly.
“Oh, stop it!” Again there was more energy than the moribund are wont to manifest. There was even a vigorous impatience in her tone as she went on, “You know well enough what I was afraid of. And you know well enough what I want to hear right now. Shoot, can’t you?”
He shot. He stood up, backed away from the couch to where he could conveniently regard its stricken occupant, and shot gaily.
“Well, it’ll be a good lesson to you about me, this thing of your thinking I was fooled over that piece. I s’pose you and Baird had it between you all the time, right down to the very last, that I thought he was doin’ a serious play. Ho, ho!” He laughed gibingly. It was a masterful laugh. “A serious play with a cross-eyed man doing funny stuff all through. I thought it was serious, did I? Yes, I did!” Again the dry, scornful laugh of superiority. “Didn’t you people know that I knew what I could do and what I couldn’t do? I should have thought that little thing would of occurred to you all the time. Didn’t you s’pose I knew as well as any one that I got a low-comedy face and couldn’t ever make the grade in a serious piece?
“Of course I know I got real pathos—look how I turned it on a couple o’ times in that piece last night—but even when I’m imitating a bad actor you can see it ain’t all acting. You’d see soon enough I was a bad actor if I tried to imitate a good one. I guess you’d see that pretty quick. Didn’t you and Baird even s’pose I’d found out my limits and decided to be what God meant me to be?