Indolent, but immensely clever, little Miss Shore’s girlhood had been one endless hell of maternal maulings. She was whipped if she neglected voice and piano; beaten if she shirked dramatic drill; kicked into dancing school, and spanked if she loitered late away from home. Yet she’d never have been anybody otherwise.
She had Jewish blood in her. She was distractingly pretty.
“Mom’s a terror,” she used to remark, reflectively. “She thumped me till I saw so many stars that I turned into one.”
She sang the lead in “The Girl from Jersey”—into which a vigorous kick from her mother had landed her, to puzzle a public which never before had heard of Rosalind Shore.
The show ran until July and was to resume in September.
The girlhood of Bettina—or Betsy—Blythe, had been very different. She was one of a swiftly increasing number of well-born girls whom society had welcomed as débutantes, and who, after a first season, and great amateur success in the Junior League, had calmly informed her family that she had made a contract with some celluloid corporation to appear in moving pictures.
New York society was becoming accustomed to this sort of behaviour. It had to be. From the time that the nation’s war-bugles sounded assembly at Armageddon, the younger generation had taken the bit between its firm teeth. Nothing had yet checked them. They still were running away.
In Annan’s little drawing-room, where coffee had been served, the excited chatter continued to turn around Betsy’s brand new company,—this event being the reason for the dinner.
Every capitalist involved was discussed, and pulled to quivering pieces; every officer and director in the Betsy Blythe Company, Inc. was dissected under the merciless scrutiny of four young people who already had learned in New York to believe only what happened, and to turn deaf ears to mere words.