Miss Goldie Raymond nodded, though she was wholly absorbed in a full-length enlarged photograph which hung framed and glazed on the wall behind Fieldstone's desk. She looked at it as a millionaire collector might look at a Van Dyck he had recently acquired from an impoverished duke, against a meeting of protest held in Trafalgar Square. Her head was on one side. Her lips were parted. It was a portrait of Miss Goldie Raymond as Mitzi in the Viennese knockout of two continents—"Rudolph, Where Have You Been."
"Now this new show will stay on Broadway a year and a half, kid," Mr. Fieldstone proceeded, "in case I get the right people to push it. Therefore I'm offering you the part before I speak to any one else."
"Any one else!" Miss Raymond exclaimed. "Well, you've got a nerve, after all I've done for you in 'Rudolph'!"
"Sure, I know," Fieldstone said; "but you've got to hand something to Sidney Rossmore."
"Him?" Miss Raymond cried. "Say, Mont, if I had to play opposite him another season I'd go back into vaudeville."
Fieldstone began to perspire freely. As a matter of fact he had signed Rossmore for the new show that very morning after an all-night discussion in Sam's, the only restaurant enjoying the confidence of the last municipal administration.
"Then how about the guy that wrote the music, Oskar Schottlaender?" he protested weakly. "That poor come-on don't draw down only ten thousand dollars a week royalties from England, France, and America alone!"
"Of course if you ain't going to give me any credit for what I've done——" Miss Raymond began.
"Ain't I telling you you're the first one I spoke to about this?" Fieldstone interrupted.
"Oh, is that so?" Miss Raymond said. "I wonder you didn't offer that Vivian Haig the part, which before I called myself after a highball I'd use my real name, even if it was Katzberger."