o," he muttered grudgingly, glad to be able to say this,
even though only to one whose attentions he meant to discourage. "If I
have to smoke one more it'll finish me."

"Now, ain't that the limit? Too bad, Kid!"

"I didn't even have any of my own. That Spanish girl gave me these."

The Montague girl glanced over his shoulder at the young woman whose
place she had usurped. "Spanish, eh? If she's Spanish I'm a Swede right
out of Switzerland. Any-way, I never could like to smoke. I started to
learn one summer when I was eight. Pa and Ma and I was out with a tent
Tom-show, me doing Little Eva, and between acts I had to put on pants
and come out and do a smoking song, all about a kid learning to smoke
his first cigar and not doin' well with it, see? But they had to cut it
out. Gosh, what us artists suffer at times! Pa had me try it a couple of
years later when I was doin' Louise the blind girl in the Two Orphans,
playin' thirty cents top. It was a good song, all right, with lots of
funny gags. I'd 'a' been the laughing hit of the bill if I could 'a'
learned not to swallow. We had to cut it out again after the second
night. Talk about entering into your part. Me? I was too good."

If the distant camera glanced this way it caught merely the persistent
efforts of a beautiful debutante who had not yet felt the blight of
Broadway to melt the cynicism of one who suffered it more and more
acutely each moment. Her hand fluttered on his sleeve and her left eye
continuously beguiled him from under the overhanging curl. As often as
he thought it desirable he put the bored glance upon her, though mostly
he stared in dejection at the coffee cup or the empty wine glass. He
was sorry that she had had that trouble with the cigar, but one who as
Little Eva or poor persecuted Louise, the blind girl, had to do a song
and dance between the acts must surely come from a low plane of art.
He was relieved when, at megaphoned directions, an elderly fop came to
whirl her off in the dance. Her last speech was: "That poor Henshaw--the
gelatin master'll have megaphone-lip by to-night."

He was left alone at his table. He wondered if they might want a
close-up of him this way, uncompanioned, jaded, tired of it all, as if
he would be saying: "There's always the river!" But nothing of this sort
happened. There was more dancing, more close-ups of Muriel Mercer being
stricken with her vision of tenement misery under the foul glare of
a middle-aged roue