“We’ll see,” he smiled.
“But—Betsy! I couldn’t do that to her!”
Or to anybody, she might have added. But the mere thought of Frank Donnell brought pleasure and gratitude.
“You’re so wonderfully kind, Mr. Smull,” she said with another radiant look as he aided her to enter the car.
As he got in after her a pallid, shabby man across the street watched her intently. He seemed interested in Smull, too, and in the shining car, and even in the license number. And he stood looking after it as long as it remained in sight.
That afternoon Eris sat idle in her dressing-room, reading, or wandered about among electric cables and lumber and sets while Mr. Creevy tried to fill in and supplement poor directorship with little fiddling re-takes.
Emil Shunk, the camera-man, slightly drunk, had turned very sulky. Most of the afternoon was wasted in futile altercation with Creevy, until the latter, exasperated, dismissed everybody.
The taxi allotted to Eris took her back to the city, tired, disgusted, and a little nervous.
The last profane scene between Creevy and Shunk, her all-day idleness, the stifling summer heat in the studio, the jolting drive back to New York through the squalor of the river-front, all these left her tired and depressed.