This simply enraptured the young mob, and showers of torpedoes fell about the stage. It fairly snowed explosives. The gravel scattered in all directions. A pebble struck Sheila on the cheek. It smarted only a trifle, but the pain was as nothing to the sacrilege.
Somehow the play struggled on to the cue for the entrance of the heroine of the play. Miss Zelma Griffen was the leading woman. She was supposed to arrive in a taxicab, and the warning “honk” of it delighted the audience. She was followed on by a red-headed chauffeur who asked for his fare, which she borrowed from the hero, then passed to the chauffeur, who thanked her and made his exit.
Miss Griffen was a somewhat sophisticated actress with a large record in college boys. While she waited for her cue, she had cannily decided to appease the mob by adopting a tone of good-fellowship. She had also provided herself with a rosette of the college colors. She waved it at the audience and smiled.
This was a false note. It was resented as a familiarity and a presumption. This same college had rotten-egged an actor some years before for wearing a ’varsity sweater on the stage. It greeted Miss Griffen with a storm of angry protest, together with a volley of torpedoes.
Miss Griffen, completely nonplussed, gaped for her line, could not remember a word of it, then ran off the stage, leaving Sheila and Mrs. Vining and Tuell to take up the fallen torch and improvise the scene. Sheila made the effort, asked herself the questions Miss Griffen should have asked her, and answered them. It was her religion as an actress never to let the play stop.
With all her wits askew, she soon had herself snarled up in a tangle of syntax in which she floundered hopelessly. The student body railed at her:
“Oh, you grammar! ’Rah, ’rah, ’rah, night school!”
This insult was too much for the girl. She lost every trace of self-control.
All this time Bret Winfield had grown angrier and angrier. Bear-baiting was one thing; but dove-baiting was too cowardly even for mob-action, too unfair even for a night of sports, unpardonable even in Freshmen. He was thrilled with a chivalrous impulse to rush to the defense of Sheila, whose angry beauty had inflamed him further.
He stood up in the proscenium box and tried to call for fair play. He was unheard and unseen; all eyes were fastened on the stage where the fluttering actress besought the howling stage-manager to throw her the line louder.