THE LONG WAY ’ROUND
The Girl from Philadelphia wasn’t a beauty by any means, but she had a nice fetching way, good teeth, and a cheerful, contagious laugh which are three things that have beauty left at the post. Beauty, you see, is only good for a short sprint at the best, and in a long race is liable to lag a bit toward the finish, but the other propositions are stayers nine times out of ten and generally manage to come under the wire in good shape.
Thirty days in the big city, if spent in the right kind of company, usually mean about a year in Quakertown, and force of circumstances had thrown The Girl in pretty close contact with high-flyers. You see, it all came about this way:
She had been playing the soubrette part in some amateur theatricals, and everybody who saw her—except some girl friends who wanted to be soubrettes, too—said she was the real thing and that she had Della Fox in her palmy days beaten the length of Chestnut street, and as for Millie James, why there was nothing to it.
That started the theatrical bee buzzing in her conning-tower, so she immediately formed the habit of reading the theatrical papers instead of the society notes, and she got the matinee habit so bad that she didn’t miss one show a month. Before that her fad had been gymnastics and she was the real thing on physical culture.
She was once the real thing on physical culture
Now when a girl gets that way she needs either a husband and honeymoon to distract her attention or a hard-faced guardian—female, of course—to follow her wherever she goes.
So in view of the fact that this girl had neither, she studied the play bills and did pretty much as she liked. She was just ripe to sign with a traveling show or listen to the argument of any actor man who offered her the bait of a chance to do a stunt behind the footlights. She lived the way a soubrette ought to live—at least, she thought she did. In a locked drawer in her dressing case she kept a box of make-up, and when the rest of the family had retired she fixed her face up so she looked like a comic valentine. She figured upon this as a sort of preliminary training in case she should ever get a chance to break into the business; look like a twenty-dollar gold piece to the public, and feel like a plugged nickel when she was in her dollar-a-day room after the show. She might have been dreaming yet if a young fellow who once suped for Mansfield hadn’t made her acquaintance. He called on her at her home, and they hadn’t been talking twenty minutes when she sprung the soubrette business, and told him that some day she hoped to get on the professional stage.
“The only way to get a chance is to go to New York,” he said. “There’s where all the good shows start from, as well as a good many of the bad ones, and if a girl has talent, an agent or a manager will grab her just the same as a hobo will grab a ham sandwich, no matter what his nationality is. Why, I once knew a girl who went there from Forked River, New Jersey. She didn’t know anything, but she had ginger, and she’s been on the road for two seasons with the Bon Ton Burlesquers. What do you think of that? Philadelphia’s all right in a way, but I’ll bet if Maude Adams had been born here she’d be behind the ribbon counter in some big dry goods store instead of the swellest little actress that ever took a bunch of roses over the footlights.”