Blue-grass and Broadway

by Maria Thompson Daviess

"Oh, I didn't write that at all!" she whispered, as she fairly shrank against Mr. Vandeford's strength of mind, if not against the strength of his arm that he had laid across the back of her chair.

"Just sit still and listen to-day as though it were somebody else's play, and we will talk it over afterward. You know I—I warned you," he whispered with soothing tenderness, his lips almost against her ear in the dusk of the box.

"I promised, and I will," she answered him, and he was at a loss to know if she really did flutter to him a fraction of an inch as he had suspected her of doing in his car on the night of her début on Broadway. The charm of Kentucky girls is composed of many illusions and realities, which they themselves hardly understand, and use by hereditary instinct.

And with her proud head poised in all stateliness, Miss Patricia Adair sat for five solid hours and heard "The Purple Slipper," née "The Renunciation of Rosalind," read from first to last page by the people who were to present it to the public; and Mr. Vandeford found his heart bleeding for the thrusts into hers. Not a protest did she make, but the roses faded and the gray eyes sank far back behind their black defending lashes, and they were glittering with suppressed tears as the wearied company rose to its feet after the last line.

"Here to-morrow at eleven sharp," were Mr. Rooney's words of dismissal as he and Fido followed the company in their hurried exit toward the stage-door, with not so much as a glance at the box in which sat the stricken author.

And there alone, off the dismal and dismantled stage in the cool dusk of the box, producer and author faced each other and the situation.

"If my grandfather were not—not—dying, I'd take it right home and burn it all up!" were the first words the author of "The Purple Slipper" gave utterance to, after the last echo of the last footstep had died off the stage.

"You couldn't, you've sold it to—to me," Mr. Vandeford answered with a coolness in his voice that restored her mental balance, as he had intended it should. "Now answer me truly; is it or is it not a good play?"

"It's not my play; it's horrid and vulgar!" the author stormed, with lightning burning up the tears in her gray eyes.

"That whole situation is exactly as you wrote it, and about a third of the lines are yours, or will be yours by the time it is at the first night, if you play the game. I have not decided whether I think it is a good play or not. If I think it isn't, you may have it and burn it up. I don't know what Rooney thinks yet. If he doesn't want to go on, I won't." Mr. Vandeford had known the women of many climes, and he found himself using that experience on Miss Adair with great skill, though it hurt him to do so.