"I couldn't be otherwise," she cried at once. "Our play is to startle the world—first here, then on Broadway——"
"Sigrid," I said, "what is there about this play that has such a charm for you? I know that it's a notable literary discovery, and that it's pretty powerful stuff in spots, but in the final analysis it's only melodrama with a clever supernatural twist. You're not the melodramatic type."
"Indeed?" she flung back. "Am I a type, then?"
I saw that I had been impolitic and made haste to offer apology, but she waved it aside.
"What you said might well be asked by many people. The pictures have put me into a certain narrow field, with poor Jake Switz wearing out the thesaurus to find synonyms for 'glamorous'. Yet, as a beginner in Sweden, I did Hedda Gabler and The Wild Duck—yes, and Bernard Shaw, too; I was the slum girl in Pygmalion. After that, a German picture, Cyrano de Bergerac, with me as Roxane. It was luck, perhaps, and a momentary wish by producers for a new young foreign face, that got me into American movies. But, have I done so poorly?"
"Sigrid, nobody ever did so nobly."
"And at the first, did I do always the same thing? What was my first chance? The French war bride in that farce comedy. Then what? Something by Somerset Maugham, where I wore a black wig and played a savage girl of the tropics. Then what? A starring rôle, or rather a co-starring rôle—opposite you." She gave me a smile, as though the memory were pleasant.
"Opposite me," I repeated, and a thrill crept through me. "Lavengro, the costume piece. Our costumes, incidentally, were rather like what we will wear in the first part of Ruthven."
"I was thinking the same thing. And speaking of melodrama, what about Lavengro? You, with romantic curly side-burns, stripped to the waist and fighting like mad with Noah Beery. Firelight gleaming on your wet skin, and me mopping your face with a sponge and telling you to use your right hand instead of your left——"
"By heaven, there have been lots of worse shows!" I cried, and we both laughed. My spirits had risen as we had strolled away from the lodge grounds, and I had quite forgotten my half-formed resolve to speak a warning.