“I’ve come to interview one of Bergman’s ‘types’; that new beauty, Miss Knight.  Is she here yet?”

“Sure; her and the back-drop, too.  She carries the old woman for scenery.”  Mr. Regan took the caller’s card and shuffled away, leaving Pope to watch the stream of performers as they entered and made for their quarters.  There were many women in the number, and all of them were pretty.  Most of them were overdressed in the extremes of fashion; a few quietly garbed ladies and gentlemen entered the lower dressing-rooms reserved for the principals.

It was no novel sight to the reviewer, whose theatrical apprenticeship had been thorough, yet it never failed to awaken his deepest cynicism.  Somewhere within him was a puritanical streak, and he still cherished youthful memories.  He reflected now that it was he who had laid the foundation for the popularity of the girl he had come to interview; for he had picked her out of the chorus of the preceding Revue and commented so enthusiastically upon her beauty that this season had witnessed her advancement to a speaking part.  Through Pope’s column attention had been focused upon Bergman’s latest acquisition; and once New York had paused to look carefully at this fresh young new-comer, her fame had spread.  But he had never met the girl herself, and he wondered idly what effect success had had upon her.  A total absence of scandal had argued against any previous theatrical experience.

Meanwhile he exchanged greetings with the star—­a clear-eyed man with the face of a scholar and the limbs of an athlete.  The latter had studied for the law; he had the drollest legs in the business, and his salary exceeded that of Supreme Court Justice.  They were talking when Mr. Regan returned to tell the interviewer that he would be received.

Pope followed to the next floor and entered a brightly lighted, overheated dressing-room, where Lorelei and her mother were waiting.  It was a glaring, stuffy cubbyhole ventilated by means of the hall door and a tiny window opening from the lavatory at the rear.  Along the sides ran mirrors, beneath which was fixed a wide make-up shelf.  From the ceiling depended several unshaded incandescent globes which flooded the place with a desert heat and radiance.  An attempt had been made to give the room at least a semblance of coolness by hanging an attractively figured cretonne over the entrance and over the wardrobe hooks fixed in the rear wall; but the result was hardly successful.  The same material had been utilized to cover the shelves which were littered with a bewildering assortment of make-up tins, cold-cream cans, rouge and powder boxes, whitening bottles, wig-blocks, and the multifarious disordered accumulations of a dressing-room.  The walls were half hidden behind photographs, impaled upon pins, like entomological specimens; photographs were thrust into the mirror frames, they were propped against the heaps of tins and boxes or hidden beneath