At eleven o'clock the guests of honor arrived in a taxicab. They were
Mr. William Farbish and Miss Winifred Starr. Having come, as they
explained, direct from the theater where Miss Starr danced in the first
row, they were in evening dress. Samson mentally acknowledged, though,
with instinctive disfavor for the pair, that both were, in a way,
handsome. Collasso drew him aside to whisper importantly: "Make yourself agreeable to Farbish. He is received in the most
exclusive society, and is a connoisseur of art. He is a connoisseur in
all things," added the Italian, with a meaning glance at the girl.
"Farbish has lived everywhere," he ran on, "and, if he takes a fancy to
you, he will put you up at the best clubs. I think I shall sell him a
landscape."
The girl was talking rapidly and loudly. She had at once taken the
center of the room, and her laughter rang in free and egotistical peals
above the other voices.
"Come," said the host, "I shall present you."
The boy shook hands, gazing with his usual directness into the show
-girl's large and deeply-penciled eyes. Farbish, standing at one side
with his hands in his pockets, looked on with an air of slightly bored
detachment.
His dress, his mannerisms, his bearing, were all those of the man who
has overstudied his part. They were too perfect, too obviously
rehearsed through years of social climbing, but that was a defect
Samson was not yet prepared to recognize.
Some one had naïvely complimented Miss Starr on the leopard-skin cloak
she had just thrown from her shapely shoulders, and she turned promptly
and vivaciously to the flatterer.
"It is nice, isn't it?" she prattled. "It may look a little up-stage
for a girl who hasn't got a line to read in the piece, but these days
one must get the spot-light, or be a dead one. It reminds me of a
little run-in I had with Graddy--he's our stage-director, you know."
She paused, awaiting the invitation to proceed, and, having received
it, went gaily forward. "I was ten minutes late, one day, for
rehearsal, and Graddy came up with that sarcastic manner of his, and
said: 'Miss Starr, I don't doubt you are a perfectly nice girl, and all
that, but it rather gets my goat to figure out how, on a salary of
fifteen dollars a week, you come to rehearsals in a million dollars'
worth of clothes, riding in a limousine--and ten minutes late!'"
She broke off with the eager little expression of awaiting applause,
and, having been satisfied, she added: "I was afraid that wasn't going
to get a laugh, after all."