“Why make her a factory girl?”
He threw up his hands and subsided.
Cleeburg took to pacing the floor. “Look here, Jane,” he said finally, “let’s get a line on this. You’ve given ’em a fashion plate for three solid years. Show ’em you can do something else. Otherwise they’ll get sick and tired of you. This part’s great—just what you need. You act through the first two acts and in the last you splurge. What more do you want?”
“I want it understood that I’m the star of the production!”
“Well, it is. Nobody else has a chance. Good Lord, Burke’s speeches are just feeders! You’ve got—everything.”
“I don’t see it.”
The dramatist, who was sufficiently famous to be [87] ]independent of stars, rose. “Under the circumstances, there’s no need to read further.”
“Hold on! Hold on!” Cleeburg clutched his arm. “Don’t take it like that, old man. Let’s go into the thing and see what can be done to please all parties.”
They did go into it for three long hours, at the end of which Jane Goring insisted that she must have luncheon. She was as unruffled as when she had entered—and as firm. Cleeburg was mopping his brow. Through his glasses the playwright’s eyes were blazing. It was then two forty-five. By that hour they had compromised to the extent of cutting some of the hero’s long speeches and giving her a chance to change her costume in the last act.
At luncheon Cleeburg consumed little more than whiskey and soda, and wondered why he got no cooler. Likewise he swore at the twittering of the birds and the distant clang of street cars.