to slip them a little something to be sure that they burn up all the extra stuff, so that the manager of the company wouldn’t find it should he go snooping around the bill room when the show gets in town.  He says if they get a good litho of a killing or a chorus they will go out of the way to stick them up just for art’s sake.  Wilbur is going to give me a suit case full of hard tickets to the Friar Festival, and told me to mace every John I came across on the road for as many as he would stand for.  He said the more I sent in the more he would know I loved him.  Wilbur is so romantic!

“This new comedian we got with the show is pretty good, but of course I can see defects.  And the new prima donna is real nice.  She asked me into her dressing-room the other afternoon and slipped me a little idea encourager that she had in a flask.  But the way she is in love with the tenor, honest, it’s sickening to me.  She watches him from the time he comes in the theatre until the time he leaves, and then calls him up on the ’phone at his home.

“The other day when he asked one of the girls to tie the ribbon in his cuff she got so jealous that I thought she was going to give the poor kid a lam on the lamp.  What she can see in that tenor is beyond me.  What anybody can see in a tenor has got me guessing, for that matter.  Wilbur says that’s just the way with temperamental people, and he lost a job once just because he forgot to land pictures in the Sunday editions of all the newspapers in town of the manager’s own particular guiding star, but planted a bunch of her dearest friend instead.  He says there’s no pleasing them, and the only way to have peace and harmony around the whole show shop is to print flashlights of the entire company.  And even that looks like blazes, for the editor will always reduce an eight-column flashlight to a two-column cut, no matter how many drinks you buy him.

“He says he saw a murder once—­was the only witness, in fact—­and he took it on the run to a newspaper office and offered to trade a Charles Sommerville to the editor for a reading notice about the show, and the editor told him that they could get all they wanted from the police, and what they didn’t get wouldn’t hurt the public if they didn’t know about it.  He says if that wouldn’t give the press agent art a kick in the neck nothing would.

“Wilbur says he loves his art and nothing pleases him better than to find a box office that will take his I O U. Us chorus have been sure working hard the past week, and Ben Teal has been just that kind and gentle, and didn’t put a one of us on the pan.  We certainly have got some lovely costumes; they ain’t much to them, but what there is is beautiful.  They smell a little of camphor, but they have been packed away in hampers ever since last season, and that accounts for it.