The quick flight to Chicago, the change of planes, the landing and take-off, scarcely attracted her notice, and the three hours flew by at faster than air speed. Peggy had finished reading and marking Sabina’s role, and was deep into Miriamne’s when her mother interrupted her.
“They want us to fasten our seat belts again,” she said. “We’re coming into New York now.”
This time Peggy noticed! Spread below her, stretching out as if it would never end, was the maze of streets and avenues, rivers and islands, towers and bridges, that was the city of New York. The late afternoon sun touched the windows of skyscrapers with fire, gilded the steelwork of the bridges, cast deep, black shadows into the streets and over the rooftops of low buildings. Giant liners stood tied at docks; others steamed sedately up or down the river, pushed or pulled by tiny tugs. Even from their soaring height above the scene, New York refused to look small or toylike. It stubbornly looked only like the thing it was—the busiest, tallest, most exciting city in the world!
Turning in a great, slow arc, the plane descended until it was skimming only a few feet above the waters of a broad bay. Peggy wondered if they had flown in on a seaplane, and if they were to land in the water and have to take a boat to shore, but even as the thought occurred to her, the rocky shoreline suddenly appeared beneath her, and the plane swiftly settled down on the long, concrete runway of New York’s LaGuardia Airport.
It was the rush hour, and parkways and streets were jammed with homebound cars, but their cab driver knew his way around back streets, and turned and twisted around one corner after another until Peggy lost all sense of direction. Her father, though, seemed to know exactly where they were at all times, and kept pointing out buildings and parks and bridges to Peggy and her mother, telling the name of each and how it figured in his memory. People, trucks, cars, buses, cabs, motor scooters and little foreign autos filled the streets. Mr. Lane called out the names of famous avenues as they came to and crossed them: Park Avenue ... Madison Avenue ... Fifth Avenue....
The taxi passed by store after store, their windows like so many stage sets. By the edge of Central Park, they drew up in front of their hotel. Bewildered, excited, dazzled, delighted, Peggy stepped out of the taxi and stood for the first time on the sidewalks of New York!
The temptation had been strong to give in to all the glamour of the city, to go for dinner in one of the famous restaurants, to ride in a hansom cab through Central Park behind a plodding old horse, to race through the bright streets and gather in all the excitement of New York in one whirling evening. The temptation had been strong, but Peggy had bravely fought it off. She had work to do before her tryout the next day at the New York Dramatic Academy.
After a fine but hurried dinner in the hotel’s handsome, formal dining room, Peggy and her parents went upstairs to work on her readings. She read first the passage she had marked out from Twelfth Night, since Viola was a familiar role for her and she needed only a short time to work on it. The speech she selected was the best known in the play, and for that reason it was probably the hardest to do, for everyone who would hear it would have his own idea of how it should sound. Any actor knows how hard it is to put new life into old, familiar words, and Peggy was well aware of this. Still, because this short speech gave her a chance, in only a dozen lines, to indicate the whole character of Viola, she thought it was worth the risk.
Viola, pretending to be a boy, tells the Duke Orsino of a sister she never had, and by so doing, confesses her own love for the Duke. The first difficulty of the speech lay in making Viola seem both a boy and a lovesick girl at the same time. The second difficulty was to make the imaginary sister of the speech seem like a real person.
Mr. Lane began, reading the Duke’s lines, in which he says that no woman can love as deeply as a man. When the speech was done, Peggy spoke, sounding at first completely feminine, “Ay, but I know—” She broke off the phrase in well-acted confusion, as Viola quickly realizes that she has spoken as a woman, rather than as the boy she is supposed to be.