"'I think I've struck it,' said he. 'It is both true and new!' Pop, it was like this. 'Miss Fuschia Fleming can really do things, therefore she does not waste time talking about them. One of the most competent of stage managers, she never loses her temper. Admirable self-control a striking characteristic. Thoroughly systematic and methodical.'
"Lord, Papa! I felt sorry for the kid. It like to killed me, you know. Well, I waited a bit till the daze wore off and then I said, 'I'm sorry, honey, but it won't do. If I'd made good in New York and had 'em all rooting for me, it would be different, but they're effete Easterners, boy, used to ruts and routine, and you can't change their breakfast food on 'em like that. They won't stand for it. Give 'em the same good old press notices that mother used to make back in 1860. Don't talk about my "trim neatness." You won't believe it, Daddy, but the poor kid actually did that! I said, 'Say that my favorite house costume is a Mexican riding-suit hung with silver dollars, and that, in cold weather, I always wear a Navajo blanket over my shoulders. Have a sketch of me rolling a cigarette between the thumb and second finger of one hand and throwing the lariat with the other. Describe me, when only fifteen, playing Rosalind in the redwoods of the Yosemite before a wildly enthusiastic audience of miners and cowboys. Then say that once before, when appearing before the most brilliant audience ever assembled in a San Francisco theater, I became so overwrought that I began to shoot holes through the drop curtain.' Do you think that was all right, Papa?"
Her father gazed at her with an almost awed admiration. "Honest to God, Fuschia," he said at last, "I don't know what to think of you. Here I've spent my life handling those Easterners, singly and in bunches, and here are you, without either experience or training, on to the game intuitively. Fuschia, this is a proud day for me. I've never told you, little girl, but sometimes I've had my doubts about your bringing up. I tell you after your mother ran away with my best friend and then divorced me for desertion and shortly died, leaving you, a two-year-old girl baby to me as a last bequest, it was a black hour. Like one of those Bible boys—Peter, wasn't it?—I went out and crew bitterly. 'If she was only a boy!' I said. 'What can Jim Fleming do with a she thing like this?' Then I took another look at you, in your white dress and blue shoes, smiling at me with your mouth all over your face, and, true as I stand here, Fuschia, you were the first thing in skirts that didn't seem to be looking at me across a great gulf.
"And then I talked to myself a while. You see, if your mother had come to me as man to man and said, 'Jim, I'm tired of you and I want to marry Henry,' I'd have said, hard as it might have hit me, you know that, Fuschia, 'Kate, I don't blame you, and I'll do what I can to help you.' But she preferred the feminine route, a note on the pincushion and she gone with all her jewels and ten thousand I'd given her to buy a diamond necklace. But as I say, I looked at you in your white dress and blue shoes and that friendly grin on your little mug, and I said, 'God knows how it'll work, but this girl thing here ain't going to grow up thinking that there's fences built all around her and that she's got to coax and sneak and pretend to get her way. Poor Kate! With great price she obtained her freedom, but my little Fuschia, here, she's born free.'"
"Good old Poppy-doppy!" Fuschia's tone was fondly approving and something like a tear glimmered in the depths of her turquoise eyes. "I'm glad you never tried the snaffle bit of parental training and home influences on me, because I'd sure have kicked myself free, and it mightn't have been pleasant. But to come back to the present, Mr. Hepworth is so splendid, that unless his wife is really in love with this boy-Raphael or whatever he is, I'm going to get into the game and make home happy for the Hepworths."
"Cautiously, cautiously, daughter," admonished Fleming, looking a trifle alarmed. "That's all right on the stage; but in real life when an outsider tries to join the parted hands of husband and wife, he's likely to get a cuff on the ear."
"Oh, men are crude," sighed Fuschia. "You didn't suppose I was going to do the child at Christmas act, did you? No, what I mean to do, that is, if it's just her imagination and not really her heart that's captured, is to take her boy-Raphael away from her."
Fleming gasped, and, lowering his head slightly, looked at his daughter from under his eyebrows. "Fuschia," he said, "there are few things that can feaze me. 'No limitations and no limits' has always been my motto, but you do, child, you really do take my breath away sometimes. Why, if report is true, Cress' wife is one of the most beautiful women in the world."
"Um-huh," Fuschia yawned indifferently. "What has that got to do with it? I've usually," she continued thoughtfully, "succeeded in getting anything I wanted; that is, men. The wildest of them will trot right up to me, and eat out of my hand."
"You're your father's own little girl, Fuschia," said Jim with emotion.