“This Beatrice Fairfax dope may be all right in the simple country maiden, but it don’t go in the show business worth a whoop.  You’ve got to be on your toes in this game and play no steady system.

“My, how I run on!  Here I will be late for rehearsal and will have to give the stage manager an excuse and he will fall for it until some time I have got good reason for being late, and then he will call me.

“Say, is it considered au fait for a bride-about-to-be to do a little plugging for wedding presents this early in the game?  Well, so long.”

    Sabrina in this chapter attends a beefsteak party and becomes
    involved in an argument with a certain party who was formerly
    her roommate but whom she left quietly and by night.

CHAPTER TEN

“Don’t I look like a tea store chromo?” inquired Sabrina as Estelle, her maid, opened the door.  “Oh, such a time I had!  Never again will I go to see that Alla McSweeney.  Pipe my dial!  Get onto the scratch!  There are some wounds that even powder cannot hide.  It all started this way.  The girls down at Wilbur’s show decided to give a beefsteak in honor of the prima donna getting the can.  Believe me, if they had let a hanging piece fall on her she would have got but half what was coming to her.  Cat!  Well, I should say so, dear.  She spoiled the whole effect of that ’I’d Rather Be a Lemon Than a Quince’ number just because she wouldn’t let the pony girls share the spot in the picture.  Honest, she caused more troubles than Louis Nethersole’s English actors ever imagined they had.

“I met her socially several times, and she certainly was perfectly lovely to me.  But when she got back on the stage, why, she even had the stagehands stepping sideways, and you know them.  And the manager couldn’t call his soul his own until he had loaded her into a cab and on her way.  Wilbur told me that while on the road that between watching the panners in the box offices and keeping her from throwing a fit on the stage he got gray-headed.  As for her maid, I can only say, ’Help that poor creature.’  One time the maid pinched her foot while buttoning her shoe and what does the prima donna do but bounce her whole makeup box on the top of the maid’s defenseless nob.  And the way she looks on the street compared to what she does on the stage, that makeup box must certainly have been of some size.  Of course I am not roasting the poor creature, for it may be temperament instead of temper, but I am merely stating what I have heard.

“But to get back to the big eat.  The prima donna got too gay and when they struck New York the home office got wise and she wouldn’t stand a cut in her salary, so they just naturally decorated her with the festive bug and told her to take a whirl at vaudeville or something else real mean.  Say, when the news got out that she was to leave everybody was so happy that even the chorus men went out and