PAULA IS INVOLVED IN THE FURIOUS HISTORY OF SELMA CROSS AND WRITES A
LETTER TO QUENTIN CHARTER
Paula thrust the sheets of the letter in her desk drawer and admitted
Selma Cross, an actress whose apartment was across the hall. These two
had chatted together many times, sometimes intimately. Each had found
the other interesting. Hints of a past that was almost classic in the
fury of its struggle for publicity, had repeatedly come to Paula's ears,
with other matters she greatly would have preferred not to hear. Selma
Cross was huge to look upon, and at first thought without grace. There
was something uncanny in her face and movements, and an extraordinary
breadth between her yellow eyes which were wide-lidded, slow-moving and
ever-changing. She was but little past thirty, yet the crowded traffic
of her years was intricately marked.
"I saw the light under your door, and felt like coming in for a few
minutes," she said. "I must talk to some one and my maid, Dimity, is
snoring. You see, I'm celebrating for two reasons."
"Tell me, so I can help," Paula answered.
"Vhruebert has taken a play for me. You know, I've been begging him to
for months. The play was made for me--not that it was written with me in
mind, but that I just suit it. Selma Cross is to be carved in light over
a theatre-entrance, twenty seconds from Broadway--next April. It will be
at the _Herriot_--Vhruebert's theatre. We run through Hartford,
Springfield, Rochester and that string of second cities earlier in the
Spring."
Paula rose and gave both her hands.
"Oh, I'm so glad for you," she said. "I know something about how you
have worked for this----"
"Yes, and the play is _The Thing_. I am an ugly slaving drudge, but have
all the emotions that the sweet _ingenue_ of the piece should have, and
the audience watches me deliver. Yes, I've waited long for this, and yet
I'm not so glad as I thought I should be. I've been pretty sure of it
for the last year or two. I said I was celebrating for two things----"
"Pray, what is the other?"
"I forget that it might not interest you--though it certainly does me,"
Selma Cross said with a queer, low laugh.... "He wasn't ugly about it,
but he has been exacting--ugh! The fact is, I have earned the privilege
at last of sleeping in my own respectable apartment."