That night Ruth got a new impression of Terry Riordan. He did not stay to dinner, though Gloria asked him, but he met them at the theatre. Every one seemed to know him and treated him as quite an important person. It was her first experience of a first night, and she got the impression that these people were waiting through the acts for the intermissions instead of waiting through the intermissions for the acts. Terry wasn’t in their box, he had a seat in the back of the theatre with Philip Noel, who had written the music, but he slipped in and out during the evening to chat and to hear words of praise.
“How do you think it’s going to go?” Gloria asked him when he returned to their box after the first intermission.
“Badly, I’m afraid; I met several of the newspaper men out there, and they seemed to like it. If the critics like it, it’s almost sure to close in three weeks,” said Terry.
“I won’t believe it. It is sure to have a long run,” said Gloria.
“God knows I did my best to lower the moral tone of the thing and make it successful,” said Terry. “If it will only run long enough to give me some royalties, just long enough to keep me going until my comedy is finished, I won’t care.”
They chatted on, commenting on the people on the stage until Ruth lost all sense of illusion. They took away from her the fairyland sense that had formerly made the theatre a joy, and as yet she had not acquired the knowledge of stagecraft that gives the stage a stronger fascination for theatrical folk than for the people who have never seen it in any way except from “out front.”
She knew that the music was all stolen from something else, for a composer, a rival of Philip Noel, who had dropped in to chat with Gloria, had said so; that in an effort to do something original the costumer had produced frightful results, for Terry Riordan had commented on it, and Billie Irwin had spoken of how often the leading woman flatted her notes. Her voice had been bad enough when she started ten years ago, and now it was quite hopeless.
Terry Riordan had not spoken to Ruth since their arrival, when he had pretended to be quite overcome with the grandeur of her gown. Since then he had devoted himself entirely to Gloria. Ruth couldn’t blame him for that. Gloria made every one else appear colourless. No wonder Terry Riordan loved her. It was foolish of her to let him occupy her thoughts. No man in his right mind would give her a second thought in the presence of Gloria. Even the thought that she was an art student no longer brought comfort. There were so many art students in New York. Still she could not keep Terry out of her mind. It was not that she thought him a genius. Indeed, she rather scorned his slapstick lyrics. New York might bow down before his frayed cuff cleverness, but she was from the Middle West, where men are rated by what they have done, not what they are going to do. She couldn’t analyse exactly what it was about Terry Riordan that stirred her emotions,—some sympathetic quality in his voice perhaps, his never-failing cheerfulness and his absolute confidence in his own future. She was rather glad that he didn’t talk to her very much, for she blushed whenever he spoke to her. She had blushed when he spoke about her frock and old John Courtney had commented on it in his absurd exaggerated manner.
“How charmingly you blush, Miss Mayfield,” he had said. “You must pardon an old gentleman for speaking of it, my dear, but I dare say it is the only genuine blush that Broadway has seen these forty years.”
If it had been possible to be annoyed by anything the ancient matinée idol said, Ruth would have been annoyed, especially as it momentarily attracted the attention of every one to the party, to herself.