“No—I dare say it doesn’t. She’s entitled to something to make her conspicuous.”
Often she noticed the girl at rehearsal sitting in the theater after her bit was done, leaning forward, chin in her cupped hands, mop of reddish hair falling over eyes that devoured every move the star made. Once they met at the stage entrance on their way out.
“Why don’t you go home earlier?” Goring asked. “I’m sure Mr. Cleeburg will excuse you when you’re through.”
“I’d rather stay,” the girl answered in her peculiar breathless tone. “I can learn so much from you, Miss Goring. Besides,” she paused, hesitated, “I—live in a furnished room. It isn’t much to go home to.”
“Have you been in New York long?” Goring put [96] ]the question as they moved toward the street side by side.
“A year and a half—that is, this time. I used to come whenever I could scrape together the fare while I was doing stock in the West. But there never seemed to be an opening for me. Then I decided I’d best just come and wait around or I’d never get a chance. And I waited, all right.”
Another pause while the wide wistful eyes filled with the same look of fright they had worn that first day at the theater—only this time it was the fright of memory.
“Mr. Cleeburg has been wonderful to me. I’ll never be able to thank him enough.”
They had reached the curb. Goring smiled. “I shall tell him that,” she said, and with a nod stepped into her car and drove off.
In Washington she noticed that Miss Cromwell was looking better, though the eyes were as hungry as ever and the figure as slight. Undoubtedly Cleeburg was right. What she had needed was a few square meals. Her strength seemed to increase as work increased and in their scene together Goring remarked a give and take that made her own work mount to greater intensity. It was a short scene in which the younger sister who had hovered like a silent brooding shadow in the background pleaded with the older not to break away from her own class, not to try to go into a world she did not understand—and was met by the defiance of one molded to make a place for herself in any world. The scene went so well, in fact, that the author, at Cleeburg’s request, lengthened it. At the end when Goring held out her [97] ]arms and folded the weeping girl in them, a gratifying sniffle and the flutter of white went through the house. Which is the most either star or manager can ask.