Sabrina returns to the chorus so that she can keep an apartment, a maid and an automobile without causing comment. She also talks of getting a house-boat for the summer with some girl friends and discourses on the advisability of having the wardrobe mistress for a chaperone.
CHAPTER NINE
"Virtue has its own reward and that's all it ever gets," remarked Sabrina, the Show Girl, as we met her on the street. "I am once again a wage-earner. This floating around town as one of the idle rich is all to the peaches for a while, but as a continuous performance it makes a poor showing. You know when I first became an heiress I had a call-board put up in my boudoir and a little notice pinned on it that read, 'Rehearsal, 10 o'clock to-morrow, everybody,' and then I would lay in bed all morning and make faces at it.
"Everybody had a large bunch of fun kidding me about my inheritance till I was nearly bug. Why, would you believe it? I couldn't go to dinner or riding with a gentleman friend, but some humorous dame sitting at another table would arch her eyebrows and then, if I introduced them to the gent, they would say, 'I am very glad to meet you, Mr. Suchandsuch; how are things in Pittsburg?'
"At last it got so bad that I decided to go back to work and earn my little twenty per, so that I could keep my automobile and wear good clothes without the slightest taint of suspicion on my character. With that noble end in view I started on the still hunt. Nothing doing with that traveling thing.
"I tucked my little scrapbook under my arm and sat in the waiting-room. After hanging around in there for about half an hour I would be permitted to glide into the big boss. I had a nice little monologue framed up as to my virtues—no, that's the wrong word—ability.
"None of the managers asked me what I had done, but what did I GET.
"When I called on the gentlemen by whom I am now employed he said:
'Talent? Oh, piffle! Can you wear tights?' He said that to me.
"I merely mentioned that I used to work for Mr. Ziegfeld and he hired me at once. I didn't even have to show him my picture taken as Aphrodite in a classical art study.
"I went over to rehearsal, and of all the frowsy dames I ever piped—far be it from me to knock, but they looked like a bunch of pie-trammers that had just rushed over from Child's. The stage manager was a friend of mine, and I asked him when he had started an old ladies' home, and he told me—mind you, this is the strictest confidence—that the divorce courts and the cheap rates from Pittsburg was raising Cain with the crop of merry-merries.