Blue-grass and Broadway

by Maria Thompson Daviess

"Into what danger are you taking me now?" asked Miss Adair with a fluty, merry laugh.

"We are going with Mr. Farraday and Miss Hawtry to see the Big Show and to the Grove Garden on the roof afterward for supper. Just a slow, usual sort of an evening, but Denny thought it would be fun for you to see the Big Show and the Big Feed and the Big Dance by way of initiation," Mr. Vandeford answered, with an entire lack of enthusiasm.

"I wanted to see what you wanted me to see this first night," Miss Adair said with the affectionate frankness of six years going on seven. "What would that be?"

"We'll see it to-morrow night," Mr. Vandeford answered her, and this time the tenderness in his voice surprised him and he considered it entirely unjustifiable.

"Mr. Height was going to take me to see Maude Adams, but I know he'll put it off again when I tell him that you want me to—"

"No, don't! Let Height get Maude Adams out of his system, for Heaven's sake," snapped Mr. Vandeford, this time in unjustifiable temper.

"Why, what is—" Miss Adair was asking of Mr. Vandeford in positive alarm when Valentine stopped before the blazing doorway of the Big Show. A functionary seven feet tall opened the door of the car and all but literally extracted them by force, for he was anxious to repeat the operation on the occupants of the car chugging behind them.

Now, there are many, many fair women born within the state lines of Old Kentucky who live calm and peaceful lives and die and are buried with no greater contrast of experience than comes from birth and death, love and hate, riches and poverty, and they never know the difference; but occasionally one bursts out of her bonds and flames her beauty over strange worlds, in foreign embassies, in the courts of St. James or Petrograd, or in an opera or theater box in New York. When this eruption occurs many sparks fly. And many sparks from bright eyes were showered on the author of "The Purple Slipper," who sat calmly unaware in the left stage-box of the Big Show that August night beside the notorious Hawtry, Mr. Godfrey Vandeford, and Mr. Dennis Farraday. And of the sparks no one was more conscious than both Miss Hawtry and Mr. Vandeford, while big Dennis was in a blissfully ignorant state of mind like to that of Miss Patricia Adair of Adairville, Kentucky. Though he had been for about forty-eight hours a producer on the rear side of the footlights, Mr. Farraday still had the attitude of mind possessed by one of an audience, and he watched the stage rather than the "front." He thus failed to get the impression created by his guest from Kentucky, and blissfully left Mr. Vandeford to deal with her sensations derived from the show. Mr. Vandeford had his hands full.

To Miss Adair the Big Show was a series of mental and moral and artistic explosions. She sat with delight through the Japanese acrobats and Swiss quartette of yodelers, and she welcomed pretty, pert little Mazie Villines with enthusiasm that gradually faded into horror as that artist flaunted more and more lingerie and "dished the dirt" which the inebriate playwright, at that moment engaged in "putting pep" into Miss Adair's own beloved "Purple Slipper," née "The Renunciation of Rosalind," had supplied. The "dirt" was received by the audience at large with a hilarious joy that entirely justified the managers of the Big Show for keeping Mazie busy "dishing."

However, all things come to an end, and with a last provocative, revealing kick Mazie was allowed to depart and give way to a pair of young dancers who promised to display wares more wholesome.