“I guess you must have been crazy with the heat,” he said.
“Call it that,” said Sheila. And she rejoined the company, trying not to be either uppish or ’umble in her new quality as the star.
The author of the play was a Parisian plutocrat whose wares had traversed all the oceans, though he had never ventured across the English Channel. So he was not present to read the play aloud. Ben Prior, the adapter, was a meek hack afraid of his own voice, and Batterson was not inclined to show the company how badly their director read. His assistant distributed the parts, and the company, clustered in chairs, read in turn as their cues came.
Each had hefted his own part, and judged it by the number of its pages. One might have guessed nearly how many pages each had by the vivacity or the dreariness of his attack.
“Eight sides!” growled old Jaffer as he counted his brochure.
It is a saddening thing to an ambitious actor to realize that his business for a whole season is to be confined to brief appearances and unimportant speeches.
People congratulated old Jaffer because he was out of the play after the first act. But, cynic as he was, he was not glad to feel that he would be in his street mufti when the second curtain rose. It is pleasant to play truant, but it is no fun to be turned out of school when everybody else is in.
Of all the people there the most listless was the one who had the biggest, bravest rôle, the one round which all the others revolved, the one to whom all the others “fed” the words that brought forth the witty or the thrilling lines.
Sheila had to be reminded of her cue again and again. Batterson’s voice recalled her as from a distance.
It is as strange as anything so usual and immemorial can be, how madly lovers can love; how much agony they can extract from a brief separation; what bitter terror they can distil from ordinary events. As the tormented girl read her lines and later walked through the positions or stood about in the maddening stupidities of a first rehearsal, she had actually to battle with herself to keep from screaming aloud: