“When the drop fell on that act I was lost. I was an orphan for true. I couldn’t rest till I saw the manager and asked him to take me back and introduce me to her. He gave me a nasty grin and said he didn’t run that kind of a theater, and I said I’d knock his face off if he thought I thought he did. Well, he gave in finally and took me back. I fell down the side-aisle steps and sprawled along the back of the boxes and stumbled up the steps to the stage.
“And then I met Mamise––that was her name on the program––Mamise. She was pretty and young as ever, but she wasn’t a nymph any longer. She was just a young, painted thing, a sulky, disgusted girl. And she was feeding a big monkey––a chimpanzee or something. It was sitting on a bicycle and smoking a cigar––getting ready to go on the stage.
“It was so human and so unhuman and so ugly, and she was so graceful, that it seemed like a sort of satire on humanity. The manager said, ‘Say, Mamise, this gentleman here wants to pays his respecks.’ She looked up in a sullen way, and the chimpanzee showed his teeth at me, and I mumbled something about expecting to see the name Mamise up in the big electric lights.
“She gave me a look that showed she thought I was a darned fool, and I agreed with her then––and since. She said, ‘Much obliged’ in a contemptuous contralto and––and turned to the other monkey.
“The interview was finished. I backed over a scene-prop, knocked down a stand of Indian-clubs, and got out into the alley. I was mad at her at first, but afterward I always respected her for snubbing me. I never saw her again, never saw her name again. As for the big electric lights, I was a punk prophet. But her name has stood out in electric lights in my––my memory. I suppose she left the stage soon after. She may be dead now.
“It hurt me a lot to have her wither me with that one big, slow glance of hers, but I was glad of it afterward. It made me feel more comfortable about her. If she had welcomed every stranger that came along she––well, as she didn’t, she must have been a good girl, don’t you suppose?”
The road still pierced the golden scene, a monotony of plenty, an endless-seeming treasure of sheaves of wheat and 171 stacks of corn, with pumpkins of yellow metal and twisted ingots of squash; but an autumnal sorrow clouded the landscape for Marie Louise.
“What do you call a good girl?” she asked.
“That’s a hard question to answer nowadays.”