“This must be where I go,” Peggy thought, starting for a nearby door marked OFFICE. She took a deep breath, opened the door, and walked in.
The pretty receptionist, greeting her by name, said that she was expected and that Mr. Macaulay, the director of the Academy, would see her right away.
The first thing that Peggy noticed was the office, in the elaborate clutter of which Mr. Macaulay seemed to have disappeared. It was a large, square room, its walls paneled from the Oriental rugs to the high, carved ceiling. Two tall windows draped in red velvet showed glimpses of rooftops and river through lace curtains. Every available piece of wall was covered with pictures: photographs of people who were surely actors and actresses, paintings of people and of places, heavily framed etchings, newspaper clippings, book jackets, theater programs, old theater posters, magazine articles and, apparently, everything else that could possibly fit into a frame. Where there were not pictures, there were books, except for one narrow wall space between the windows, where there was a small marble fireplace, over the mantel of which rose a tall mirror. The mantel itself was a jumble of pipes, tobacco tins, more pictures in small frames, china figurines, candlesticks and boxes assembled around a pendulum clock which stood motionless under a bell-shaped glass cover.
In one corner of the room was a heavily carved black grand piano, covered with a fringed cloth and stacked high with ragged piles of sheet music, play scripts, books, more pipes, more pictures.
In the opposite corner stood an immense desk, also heavily carved, and behind its incredibly cluttered surface rose the tall back of a thronelike chair. In the chair, almost lost from view, sat Mr. Macaulay.
When Peggy first realized he was there, she almost laughed, thinking of various animals whose protective coloration lets them melt into their natural backgrounds, the way the dappled coat of a deer seems merely more of the forest pattern of light and shade.
Mr. Macaulay was as ornate as his room. He was a small, round man who concealed a cherubic smile beneath a pair of curly, white handlebar mustaches. His red cheeks and white hair made the perfect setting for bright blue eyes that glittered behind an old-fashioned pair of pince-nez glasses perched precariously on his nose. A black ribbon from the eyeglasses ended in a gold fitting secured in his lapel. The round expanse of his shirt front was covered by a brocaded, double-breasted vest such as Peggy had never seen except in movies set in the Gay Nineties, and when Mr. Macaulay rose in smiling greeting and came around the end of the desk, Peggy could not help looking down to see if he wore gray spats. He did.
“Welcome!” Mr. Macaulay boomed in a surprising bass voice. “Now let’s sit down and talk this over.” He motioned Peggy to sit on one of a pair of straight-backed chairs, while he stood by the other with one foot up on its petit-point seat.
“Now,” he said abruptly, “what makes you think you can act?”
Taken aback, Peggy stammered a little. “Well ... well, I’ve been in a lot of plays in college and high school and ... and I always got good reviews ... I mean, everybody always thought that I was....”