The bloods of New York patronize the Summer Garden with a loyalty that brings them back at least once a week. The one theater in town it is in which the chorus fraternizes with the audience, tripping down a runway into the aisles to trill their syncopated love ditties into the ears of selected members, or swinging overhead on ropes of roses, bare knees perilously near bald heads. Buyers, politicians, traveling salesmen, miners and perfectly proper tired business men with their smiling better halves all enter the place with a twinkle of anticipation and come out humming a medley of haunting tunes.
On the night in question, one of early March, Miss Mariette Mallard’s voluminous moleskin wrap was draped over the back of her chair and she pulled it round her with a pretty baby shiver as she scanned the girl who had just come in. Then she winked at the black-eyed one.
“Well,” she observed, forgetting to go on with her story, “how is mamma’s sparkler to-night?”
The girl bit her lip, then turned with a grin that was not in her eyes and flashed under Miss Mariette’s little nose the hand that had dusted the mirror. On its third [251] ]finger blinked a diamond, the size and brilliance of which was breath taking.
Miss Mallard promptly turned her attention to the black-eyed one. “Gracie deah, suppose you had a block of ice like that—wouldn’t you try to make your clothes live up to it?”
The black-eyed one giggled: “And I wouldn’t be so upstage about it until I did.”
The object of their amusement set her teeth and turned back to the mirror, addressing the reflection: “I pay cash for my clothes. That’s more than some people can say.”
The black-eyed one giggled again. “They look it,” she murmured sweetly.
Miss Mariette indulged in a smile still more saccharine. “They look as if you paid nothing for them, my deah. Take my advice and pay cash to get rid of them.” She gave a dismissing flourish of her small hand and patted her pale blonde ringlets.
The chorus girl of to-day buys her hats on Fifth Avenue and borrows her manner from the same thoroughfare. She never forgets that a lead awaits her if she’s clever enough to look and act the part. Not that Miss Mallard had any ambitions in that direction. She was content to be cute and cuddly and first on the left in the front row. But she did try to live up to the moleskin cloak and the car that called for her every night. Only at unguarded moments did Second Avenue scratch through Fifth. “You don’t know how to manage him, my deah,” she concluded, baby blue eyes fastened on the radiant stone.