"Was Wally—was Mr. Mason there?"
"Sure. Sitting at the back."
Jill could not have said whether she was glad or sorry. She had not seen Wally since that afternoon when they had lunched together at the Cosmopolis, and the rush of the final weeks of rehearsals had given her little opportunity for thinking of him. At the back of her mind had been the feeling that sooner or later she would have to think of him, but for two weeks she had been too tired and too busy to re-examine him as a factor in her life. There had been times when the thought of him had been like the sunshine on a winter day, warming her with almost an impersonal glow in moments of depression. And then some sharp, poignant memory of Derek would come to blot him out.
She came out of her thoughts to find that the talk had taken another turn.
"And the wortht of it is," the Cherub was saying, "we shall rehearthe all day and give a show every night and work ourselves to the bone, and then, when they're good and ready, they'll fire one of us!"
"That's right!" agreed the Southern girl.
"They couldn't!" Jill cried.
"You wait!" said the Cherub. "They'll never open in New York with thirteen girls. Ike's much too thuperstitious."
"But they wouldn't do a thing like that after we've all worked so hard!"
There was a general burst of sardonic laughter. Jill's opinion of the chivalry of theatrical managers seemed to be higher than that of her more experienced colleagues.