Peggy reflected for a minute. “No, I don’t think so,” she said at length. “If she had been willing to move out of that apartment, she would have done it before this. I don’t think she’d be at all happy here. She’s so—well, so secretive, and I think that all she wants is to be left alone. I suppose that sounds pretty strange, and pretty self-indulgent, too, but as I told you, I think she’s having some kind of trouble that we don’t even know about, and she obviously doesn’t want us to know. I don’t think it would be helping at all if we tried to get her to come to live with us.”
“Maybe you’re right,” May Berriman said. “One sure way to be of no help at all is to try to change a person’s way of living. At any rate, you can tell her that the room is here for her to use in case she wants to.”
“I will,” Peggy said. “And I’d like nothing better than to have her say yes, but I just know she won’t.”
Maggie stood up, uncoiling from her cross-legged position in a single, fluid movement. “I guess it’s all settled, then,” she said. “The only thing for us to do now is to get up the money.” Digging into the pocket of her blue jeans, she produced a small wallet from which she extracted three crumpled dollar bills and two quarters. “Here’s my first week’s dues in the Help Paula Club,” she said.
The rest of the girls hurried up to their rooms to find money and, five minutes later, after a confused session of change-making, Peggy had twenty-five dollars (May Berriman had insisted on giving an extra fifty cents to make the sum come out even) carefully sealed in an envelope.
Thanking their housemates, Peggy, Amy, and Greta excused themselves. They had barely enough time for a quick dinner before reporting to rehearsal.
“We’ve got good friends,” Peggy said as they seated themselves in a booth in a nearby restaurant where they often went. “It certainly was generous of them to contribute to a girl they don’t even know.”
“That’s one of the nicest things about show business,” Greta said. “I guess it’s because everyone in the business has been out of work and in hard circumstances at one time or another. They’re always willing to help another actor who’s having a hard time. Maybe it’s a kind of insurance policy against the next time they’re in trouble themselves.”
“It ought to be even easier to collect the other half of the money from the cast,” Amy commented. “And once we have that, Paula will be all right.”
“In a sense, she will be,” Peggy said with a worried expression. “At least she’ll be all right financially. But I don’t think we’ve begun to settle her problems, and I don’t know if we should even try.”