“But how can I get up, if you please, until you lower the curtain?”
Mrs. Vickery had been a parent often enough and long enough to obey the solemn behests of children without impertinent whys. She could not imagine what incantational power might reside in the roller window-shade, but she hurried to it and pulled it down.
The little girl scrambled to her feet with a smile of brave regret: “Thank you ever so much! That’s not a ’maginary curtain, but only a real one. Still, it will have to do, I s’pose.” Then she addressed the other victims of fate, all of whom were craning their necks to peek: “Now, ladies and gent’men, take your curtain calls.”
On every hand, as at a little local Judgment Day, the dead arose. They joined hands in a line at her signal. Then she hissed from the side of her mouth, “Now raise it, please.” The curtain shot up with a slap. “Thank you. And if you wouldn’t mind applaudin’ a little.”
The reaction from her terror had rendered Mrs. Vickery almost hysterical, but she managed to keep her face straight and her hands busy while the line bowed and bowed.
Once more the directress whispered to Mrs. Vickery, “Pull the curtain down a minute, please, and let it go up again.” When this was done she said, “If you got any flowers handy, they’d be nice.”
Mrs. Vickery unpinned a small bouquet of violets she had presented herself with at the florist’s and tossed it at the foot of the swaying line.
The directress hissed from the other side of her mouth, “Pick ’em up, ’Gene, and give ’em to me.”
Eugene stooped so hastily and with such rigidity of knee that an over-tried button at the back of his knickers shot across the room. Dorothy, who had not ceased to giggle, whooped with joy at this, and received a glare of rebuke from the star. This did not silence Dorothy. But then her parents had tried for nine years to find some way of making her stop laughing without making her begin to cry.