"Programme is good," she mused. "I've been on a whole lot of programmes during my brief career. What I want to get on some time, if possible, is a pay-roll. Wait! Don't say it! I was only trying to be funny; I didn't know how it would sound or I wouldn't have said anything so stupid. You've done more than enough for us, Mr. Barnes. Don't let yourself in for anything more. This thing will turn out like all the rest of our efforts. We'll collapse again with a loud report, but we're used to it and you're not."
"But I'm only letting myself in for a couple of hundred," he protested. "I can stand that much of a loss without squirming."
"You know your own business," she said shortly, almost ungraciously. "I'm only giving you a little advice."
"Advice is something I always ignore," he said, smiling. "Experience is my teacher."
"Advice is cheaper than experience, and a whole lot easier to forget," she said. "My grandfather advised my father to stay in the hardware business out in Indiana. That was thirty years ago. And here we are to-day," she concluded, with a wide sweep of her hand that took in the forlorn landscape. She said more in that expressive gesture than the most accomplished orator could have put into words in a week.
"But there is always a to-morrow, you know."
"There may be a to-morrow for me, but there are nothing but yesterdays left for dad. All of his to-morrows will be just like his yesterdays. They will be just as empty of success, just as full of failure. There's no use mincing matters. We never have had a chance to go broke for the simple reason that we've never been anything else. He has been starring for fifteen years, hitting the tanks from one end of the country to the other. And for just that length of time he has been mooning. There's a lot of difference between starring and mooning."
"He may go down somewhat regularly, Miss Thackeray, but he always comes up again. That's what I admire in him. He will not stay down."
Her eyes brightened. "He is rather a brick, isn't he?"
"Rather! And so are you, if I may say so. You have stuck to him through all--"
"Nothing bricky about me," she scoffed. "I am doing it because I can't, for the life of me, get rid of the notion that I can act. God knows I can't, and so does father, and the critics, and every one in the profession, but I think I can,--so what does it all amount to? Now, that will be enough about me. As for you, Mr. Barnes, if you have made up your mind to be foolish, far be it from me to head you off. You will drop considerably more than a couple of hundred, let me tell you, and--but, as I said before, that is your business. I must be off now. It's a long part and I'm slow study. So long,--and thanks!"