“With all due regard to Wilbur’s feelings I must say that the agent of our company is a dog.  He had the nerve to come up to us girls and want us to beat it up and down Broadway with signs boosting the show on our backs.  A doll would stand a swell chance in Jack’s with a big sign reading, ’Go see ‘The Abused Cruller’ at the Folly’ on her vertebrae, now wouldn’t she?

“Can you see me as the walking three-sheet?  I make exhibition enough of myself on the stage without prancing up and down with one of those things tied to my Fluffy Ruffles.

“I just had an awful time in Washington.  One of the girls that dresses in the same room with me came in with one of those crying buns on and shed so many weeps in my makeup box that I had to put it on with an atomizer.

“I did all a human being could do to bring her to—­rubbed her hands and slapped her face; but even then she was in no fit condition to appear.  Go on she would, in spite of my prayers, and what does she do when she comes tripping on, blithe and gay as a school girl, but stumble and do a slide on her profile half way across the O.P. side, just as the tenor was starting the chorus to his song, ‘Bevey in Little Children.’  He being a nervous party springs a blue note that got the musical director hysterical and he forgot to give the bass drum man his cue and the whole thing went to blazes.

“It was lucky that the stage manager was making a date on the dressing room stairs, or what she would have got would have been a-plenty.

“You know Laura O’Toole who was married a few weeks ago?  Well, she is again a widow.  Her husband got a job with a road show.  She was thinking of wearing mourning, but her husband staked her to the price of a new spring suit and she said that conventionalities could go hang, as she had a shape and was going to show it.  I don’t blame her.  Why let grief put it on style?

“Gee, it won’t be long before summer, and then we will get our salaries reduced.  That’s the trouble with the people I work for.  Every time they get a success here in town they start to reduce salaries.  If the company would stand for it we would be owing them money every week before the end of the season.  They think a girl hasn’t nothing to do but ride around in an automobile and look sweet.

“Well, me to get on the war paint.  Say, have you offered your services for the Friar Festival yet?  Well, you had better get on the job if you want to consider yourself classy.  So long!  Oh, you know the ushers will hand flowers over the footlights if you just tell him who they are for.  Bye-bye.”

The show opens on Broadway and Sabrina shows surprise at the number of harsh words in the English language.  She discloses the methods of the Lease Breakers Association and mentions the events that transpired at a little informal gathering.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN