"We had a blow-out on Riverside Drive, and that's what makes us late. Now I've got to take the car around to the garage," Mr. Farraday apologized, as he rumpled his leonine mane, fanned himself with his hat, and departed.
Miss Adair fairly clung to the hand of friendship offered her, with relief that it had not been withdrawn forever, as she had feared from the coolness of Mr. Vandeford's greeting before the assembled company of "The Purple Slipper."
"I'm afraid," she murmured with both alarm and amusement sparkling in her gray eyes, in which Mr. Vandeford found himself searching for a certain expression with the eagerness with which he always looked for it after even a brief separation from his author. It was there and undimmed. "Let's go sit down where he told us to," Miss Adair whispered.
"Good girl!" laughed Mr. Vandeford as he led the way to the left stage-box to which Mr. Rooney had summarily banished the author and the angel. He seated Miss Adair at the front edge of the box and took the chair close at her left. She was thus bulwarked and buttressed for any assault that might be hurled her way. It came in a very few minutes.
Miss Bébé Herne and Miss Mildred Lindsey were in the midst of reading an animated dialogue on page five by the time Miss Adair's attention was firmly riveted on the stage and the reading in progress. Fortunately the little scene was of her own writing. Mr. [Vandeford] had put it back into the play instead of the paraphrase Mr. Howard had made of it, and he was surprised to find how deeply grateful he was to himself for having given her this bit as he watched the home-made color rise under the gray eyes as the author sat and heard her written words come to life in a little bit of really sparkling character comedy, which both Miss Lindsey and experienced Bébé were acting as well as reading in such a way as to bring out all the charm of the lines. The happiness of both author and producer lasted about two minutes, then it was broken into by Mr. William Rooney with a crash.
"Nuff, there, nuff!" he commanded, in the midst of a quaint epigram, which Bébé was delivering with unction. "Audiences don't want to hear smart babble after their seats are all down. They want to see the star and get going. Cut in Miss Hawtry at the second set-to of Harriet and aunt. Take it this way: 'And my dear Rosalind has said, Harriet—' Enter Rosalind with the line you have there."
"Yes, it's time for me to get on and—" Miss Hawtry was agreeing complacently, when she was quickly snapped off in her remark.
"Line, Miss Hawtry, not gab," Mr. Rooney commanded.
Instantly Miss Hawtry was reading from her lines and faithful Fido was making annotations upon his manuscript with strokes that spelled finality to the stricken author, who raised her protesting eyes to the producer of her play.
"Steady now," Mr. Vandeford whispered. "This is the first reading, and he's setting. We can't side-track him now. Later you can—" but the author's attention was caught by the dialogue between Miss Hawtry and Bébé, which was the first full dose of the Howard fifteen-hundred-dollar, inebriate, but very brilliant and Hawtry-like, "pep."