"I said, let me alone," she repeated in the same manner, looking him
steadily in the face.
He coloured darkly, mumbled something indistinguishable, and flashed
into a short-lived fit of temper.
"What's the matter with you, anyway?" he demanded hotly.
[Illustration: "What's the matter with you, anyway?" he demanded,
hotly.]
"Nothing," she replied quietly; "only I don't want to be pawed."
"No?" he exclaimed with sarcasm. "Is that straight?"
"Yes, that's straight--and so'm I!"
Recollecting himself, Quard attempted to carry off his discomfiture with
a shrug and a laugh: "Oh, all right. Don't get huffy. I didn't mean
anything."
"I know you didn't, but don't do it again."
He turned out into the corridor; hesitated. "Well--let it go at that,
can't you?"
"All right," she said sulkily: "_you_ let it go at that."
Quard tramped off without saying anything more, and, whatever his
resentment and disappointment, schooled himself to control them, and met
her half-way to a reconciliation when the approaching hour of their
first public appearance brought them together in the wings.
And by this time Joan had been sufficiently diverted by other
experiences to have regained her normal poise. The dingy, stuffy, and
evil-smelling dressing-room to which she had been assigned had suffered
an invasion of three other women: two worn and haggard clog-dancers and
a matronly ballad-singer who, having donned an excessively soiled but
showy evening gown, had settled down calmly to her knitting: an
occupation which had interfered not in the least with her flow of
animated and not unkindly gossip. Joan gathered that her voice was the
main support of a small family, consisting of a shiftless husband and
three children, for the younger of whom the mother was knitting a pair
of small, pink bootees. These last had immediately enlisted the
sympathetic interest of the clog-dancers, one of whom boasted of the
precocity of her only child, a boy of eight living with his grandmother
in Omaha, while the other told simply of the death of two children, due
to neglect on the part of those to whom she had been obliged to entrust
them while on the road....
Joan was the first to reach the entrance to the dingy "kitchen-set"
which was to figure as a star dressing-room for the purposes of their
sketch (and, for the purposes of subsequent offerings, as the
drawing-room of a mansion on Fifth Avenue and the palm room of a
fashionable hotel). About ten times the size of any dressing-room ever
constructed, it was still atmospherically cheerless and depressing. She
looked it over momentarily to make sure that the various simple
properties were in place, and turned to find Quard approaching. Beneath
the jaunty assurance which even his hang-dog make-up couldn't wholly
disguise, she was able to detect traces of some uneasiness and anxiety.
It was a fact that he had grown a trifle afraid of her.
The discovery impressed her as so absurd that she smiled; and instantly
the man was himself again. He thrust out a hand, to which with covert
reluctance she entrusted her own.
"All right now?" he asked cheerfully.