"Thanks, old man! By!"
Another fifteen minutes was spent in long distance communication with Mr. Meyers, and it was ten minutes after three o'clock in the morning when Mr. Vandeford slipped into his chair beside his author in the little Atlantic City Theater, which Mr. Rooney had induced the old night watchman door-keeper to open up at the hour when all teeming Atlantic City is in the depths of repose. Mr. Rooney had with him the entire cast of "The Purple Slipper," to whom he had just finished explaining the cause of their extraction from their well-earned repose.
"Most of the Sister Harriet scenes are with me," Miss Bébé Herne was saying, with efficient energy fairly radiating from her big body, clothed in a decorous tailor skirt, but with a boudoir jacket serving for blouse. Also two kid curlers showed at the nape of her neck. "I can feed Miss Grayson into Miss Lindsey's part enough to get by to-morrow—to-night I mean. And Wallace can do the same when he's on with her. That ugly white cat Hawtry to double on Godfrey Vandeford after he pulled her out of Weehawken!"
"Get on, get on, everybody, and use your brains until they lather," commanded Mr. Rooney as he took his stand beside the left stage box. "Now, Miss, you gimme lines out of your head or your first draft when I call for 'em, and I'll take 'em or leave 'em as suits me. Then you smooth the ones I hand you into good talk, and we'll have a show here by sun-up that you'll be proud to invite your Christian lady friends to attend. And we'll keep all the 'pep' too, Vandeford, that you paid Howard to write into it, only we'll take the Hawtry dirt out of it. On, Betty Carrington, and the curtain's up."
Then from three o'clock in the morning until almost noon the machinery of "The Purple Slipper" was overhauled and adjusted to the new cog. Mr. Rooney lashed and rubbed and polished and oiled with never a let-up on anybody, and beside him sat the author, with her head up and the bit in her mouth. For every line that rang untrue in the reconstruction she had a true one or she took a crude bit from Mr. Rooney and polished it into place. Fido sat crouched in a front seat and transcribed every word into his prompt copy so as to be a veritable first aid.
And Mr. Godfrey Vandeford, experienced show man that he was, felt as if he was witnessing a miracle as he beheld Miss Adair's original "Purple Slipper," with its haphazard amateur charm, again put forth bud and bloom on the branches of Grant Howard's tight-knit, well-constructed, and well-rounded drama. The highly-colored flowers of Hawtry personality Mr. Rooney pruned away and constructed others for Lindsey, and Miss Adair lent them color and perfume in passing them to the new star, who was working steadily, slowly, surely, and with great power.
"Don't tell him that his eyes 'burn into yours until your soul is seared.' That's old. We got to get a kind of smile here where Hawtry looked like she was going to do the ham sandwich act to Height and his silk tights." Mr. Rooney stopped the abhorred scene, being acted along about six o'clock in the morning, to demand that it be played in the proper key, up to which he had succeeded in wringing lines from Miss Adair for the first act and most of the second. "What do hearts do to each other that's hot and decent and funny all at once?" Mr. Rooney fired this biological question to the author of "The Purple Slipper," and looked at her with a demand for an immediate answer in his little, black, driving eyes.
"She can say 'There's chaff in my heart; guard the fire in yours,'" Miss Adair supplied offhand.
"That hands it to him, and a good double meaning, too," Mr. Rooney approved. "Go ahead, Height, but don't get this lady mixed with the other kind. Remember, she lives at the ladies Christian home." The laugh that greeted this sally was an uproar that added to the dash and quick fire of the big scene, which Miss Adair and Mr. Rooney had so quickly expurgated and reconstructed between them.