"See here, Denny, I want to ask you if anything in my past life makes you think that I am a proper old hen to have a downy little chicken thrust right under my wing for safe keeping, whether I hatched her or not?" Mr. Vandeford demanded, and his rage was so perfectly impersonal and perplexed that Mr. Farraday sat down to go into the matter to his rescue.
"What do you mean, Van?" he asked in a calm voice and manner that were most grateful to Mr. Vandeford.
"Just this: Here's a girl come up here, from a place where a girl is guarded like a pearl of great price, into the muck and excitement of the getting together of a Broadway production in which she is directly interested. I don't know what to do. If I spend my time hovering over her, her show will go cold and break her. She's poor. I told her as much of what she is in for as I dared and still she wants to stay and see it all through, demands to stay and be let in for the whole thing. What'll we do?"
"Suppose she'd go with me up to visit the mater and be motored down to participate in—in expurgated moments?" asked Mr. Farraday, as he ruffled his hair into a huge plume on the top of his head.
"She would not. She's got a taste of it and she'll thirst for more. And, for all that unsophistication, she is a clever kid. She'll get Height into a costume play before luncheon is over and that'll go a long way to cinch a hit for 'The Purple Slipper.' He's made a fad of not playing costume, and all the women in New York will flock to see him in velvet and lace. She bargained that fish Corbett out of four hundred dollars in the preliminary costume deal, and if anybody has to send her home it will have to be you. I can't do it."
"Well, just gently warn her about Height and things of that kind, can't you?"
"I cannot! Would you tell a woman who is walking a tight rope that the ground sixty feet below her is covered with broken champagne bottles?"
"Then she's got to go home," decided Mr. Dennis Farraday, positively.
"How'll you make her?"
"You've got to do it. She's got awe of you planted six feet deep in her soul. Anybody could see that. You've got to send her."