"Fancy Filette," his wife broke in, "a painting, flirting, immoral!..." Jerry scraped his chair back along the floor to cover the word, but I knew where I was in a twinkling.
"Fancy Filette! She'll play it in short skirts!"
"I'll be lucky if she doesn't insist on a song and dance."
"He doesn't need to have her unless he wants to." Mrs. McDermott was positive on that point. She was sitting with both children on her lap, chiefly in order to keep up the fiction that I didn't know she had just been having hysterics, I had cautioned her against letting them climb over her, and she promptly let them, because the idea that she was tending them at a risk to her health, rather helped out with her own notion of herself as a misused but devoted wife and mother.
Jerry looked at me over her head in a mute appeal to me to understand.
"Unless Moresco puts on my play there is no chance for it," he protested. "I've been to the others. I'll tell you, though, if you go to him just as you are, he may think better of it. He can't possibly get anybody so good."
We neither of us believed that Mr. Moresco would turn down Fancy Filette for anybody, but we kept up the game of thinking so from sheer desperation. I played too at the pretence that Jerry's wife was a delicate, idealized sort of creature who did not understand the great hard world. That was no doubt what had appealed to him in the beginning, but she wasn't made up for the part. She had begun to put on weight after she had children, and her hair wanted washing. I got away as soon as I could and went straight to Sarah.
"They'd been having some kind of a row," I told her.
"Oh, it must have been Fancy Filette who set her off," Sarah was certain. "She took to you as a relief, but you'll be in for it too if you get the part."
I had to admit to myself after I had been to Mr. Moresco, that there was not much likelihood that I would get it. He laid the tips of his pudgy fingers together and addressed me with the slight blur in his speech which convinced one of the racial affinity which he commonly denied.