end in time. And in time our two
wanderers returned, but Mary first, David having been sent into Germany
with the Army of Occupation. Modest announcements in the theatrical
columns informed an indifferent theater-going world that Miss Marie
Courtenay, an actress new to Broadway, was to play the ingenue part in
the latest comedy by a highly popular dramatist. Immediately upon the
production, the theater-going world ceased to be indifferent to the new
actress; in fact, it went into one of its occasional furores about her.
Not that she was in any way a great genius, but she had a certain
indefinable and winningly individual quality. The critics discussed it
gravely and at length, differing argumentatively as to its nature and
constitution. I could have given them a hint. My predictions regarding
the ancestral potencies of the monkey-face were being abundantly
justified.
No announcements, even of the most modest description, heralded the
arrival of Sergeant Major (if you please!) David Berthelin upon his
native shores. He came at once to Our Square and tackled the Little
Red Doctor.
"Where is she?" he asked.
The Little Red Doctor assumed an air of incredulous surprise. "Have you
still got _that_ bee in your bonnet?" said he.
"Where is she?" repeated the Weeping Scion.
Maneuvering for time and counsel, the Little Red Doctor took him to see
the Bonnie Lassie and they sent for me. We beheld a new and
reconstituted David. He was no longer pretty. The soft brown eyes were
less soft and more alert, and there were little wrinkles at their
corners. He had broadened a foot or so. That pinky-delicate complexion
by which he had, in earlier and easier days, set obvious store, was
brownish and looked hardened. The Cupid's-bow of his mouth had
straightened out. High on one cheekbone was a not unsightly scar. His
manner was unassertive, but eminently self-respecting, and me, whom
aforetime he had stigmatized as a "white-whiskered old goat," he now
addressed as "Sir."
"Perhaps _you'll_ tell me where she is, sir," said he patiently.
"Leave it to me," said the Bonnie Lassie, who has an unquenchable thirst
for the dramatic in real life. "And keep next Sunday night open."
She arranged with Mary McCartney to give a reading on that evening, at
her studio, of David's "Doggy" from the "Grass and Asphalt" sketches
which he had written in hospital. It was a quaint, pathetic little
conceit, the bewildered philosophy of a waif of th
|