“And you accused me of looking for a boy friend instead of a theater!” Peggy said with a grin. “If anybody around here should blush, I think it’s you, Amy Shelby Preston!”
“Why, Ah don’t know what yo’ talkin’ about!” Amy said, in her best Southern belle manner. “Mistah Seton asked me to join him, an’ Ah scarcely thought it would be ladylike to refuse the gentleman!”
Then both girls dissolved into very unladylike giggles, and Peggy made a dash for the elevator. “See you tonight,” she called.
XI
Rehearsals
“So. ’Ow marches the search for the theater, Peggee?” Gaby asked, bouncing into the living room at the Gramercy Arms.
“Awful,” Peggy admitted, looking up at Gaby from her position on the floor. She was surrounded by scraps of paper, pencils, a classified telephone directory, and several assorted notebooks, guidebooks, and city maps. “I think it would be easier to list all the perfume shops in Paris than all the theaters built in New York since the nineties.”
“Perfume shops! Pouf!” Gaby shrugged. “We don’t ’ave so manee. Most of our perfume is export, to Amérique. But theaters! Oh! You would ’ave the same trouble in Paree as you ’ave ’ere. So, bonne chance; mean to ’ave the good luck.” With a wave of her hand she went upstairs.
“A little bonne chance is what I could use right now,” Peggy confessed to Greta, Maggie, and Amy, who were disposed in various chairs with books and magazines.
“Anything I can help you with?” Maggie asked.
“No, thanks, Maggie. I’m through the help stage. Amy and I have spent every afternoon for the last three days just trying to get a list of theaters from the city archives. It’s not that they’re not helpful down there. Everybody has been just as nice as can be, but nothing’s easy to find. In the first place, all the records aren’t kept in one big handy book, or in a list or anything simple. Oh, no! They’re in dozens and dozens of volumes marked by year, and we’re trying to go back about seventy years. Not only that, but the books aren’t separated by kinds of licenses, so that you can’t just get a volume of theater licenses. You have to look at each page to see what’s been licensed. There are groceries and bakeries and amusement parks and drugstores and hardware stores and livery stables and saddlemakers and—”