“Put it there!” he said. “They never heard of me! At least, the fellow I saw when I went down to the office hadn’t! Can you beat it?”
“Oh, did you go down there, too?” asked Nelly.
“Sure. Joe wanted to get in another show on Broadway. He’d sort of got tired of vodevil. Say, I don’t want to scare you, Nelly, but, if you ask me, that show they’re putting out down there is a citron! I don’t think Ike’s got a cent of his own money in it. My belief is that he’s running it for a lot of amateurs. Why, say, listen! Joe and I blow in there to see if there’s anything for us, and there’s a tall guy in tortoiseshell cheaters sitting in Ike’s office. Said he was the author and was engaging the principals. We told him who we were, and it didn’t make any hit with him at all. He said he had never heard of us. And, when we explained, he said no, there wasn’t going to be any of our sort of work in the show. Said he was making an effort to give the public something rather better than the usual sort of thing. No specialties required. He said it was an effort to restore the Gilbert and Sullivan tradition. Say, who are these Gilbert and Sullivan guys, anyway? They get written up in the papers all the time, and I never met any one who’d run across them. If you want my opinion, that show down there is a comic opera!”
“For heaven’s sake!” Nelly had the musical comedy performer’s horror of the older-established form of entertainment. “Why, comic opera died in the year one!”
“Well, these guys are going to dig it up. That’s the way it looks to me.” He lowered his voice. “Say, I saw Clarice last night,” he said in a confidential undertone. “It’s all right.”
“It is?”
“We’ve made it up. It was like this …”
His conversation took an intimate turn. He expounded for Nelly’s benefit the inner history, with all its ramifications, of a recent unfortunate rift between himself and “the best little girl in Flatbush,”—what he had said, what she had said, what her sister had said, and how it all come right in the end. Jill might have felt a little excluded, but for the fact that a sudden and exciting idea had come to her. She sat back, thinking. … After all, what else was she to do? She must do something. …
She bent forward and interrupted Mr Brown in his description of a brisk passage of arms between himself and the best little girl’s sister, who seemed to be an unpleasant sort of person in every way.
“Mr Brown.”