“It will have to be ready! It’s awfully good of you, Brainard; and the play might possibly make money, you know.”
“If that happens, it will break all records for the People’s. We will give it every chance, anyway. How shall we cast it? Will Clara Dudley do for the girl?”
Forgetting all about Krutzmacht’s new widow and their financial predicament they began to discuss the cast for _Her Great Adventure_. The leading character was a young woman who had come fearlessly and pennilessly out of the great West, to find a career in New York. Brainard remarked suddenly:
“The woman to play that part is Louisiana herself.” Farson, for some reason, did not welcome the suggestion strongly. He preferred to take his chances with a more experienced actress. “Where is Louisiana, by the way? You haven’t given me any news of her for some time,” Brainard asked.
“She’s in London just now—having a great time, I judge from the number of dashes and exclamations scattered over her letters. Characteristic style, you know. She hasn’t taken down much of the original bunting she carried.”
“She wouldn’t!” Brainard exclaimed with a laugh. “Louisiana is a genius. Don’t tell her what’s going to happen over here. Let her have her little dance out as long as it is possible. Her hard times, poor child, will begin soon enough!”
“She writes that Cissie Pyce is over there. Remember Cissie—our first experiment as emotional lady?”
“She wept all over this carpet when I fired her—_do_ I remember?”
“Louisiana says that Cissie has been taken up by Bantam, and is coming back to the States to play in _The Star of the Seven Seas_.”
“We’ll make somebody’s fortune yet,” Brainard commented, “by discharging ’em, if in no other way. But Louisiana was really our first and only find—the one personality that we might have developed and produced.”
“And she found us!” the secretary corrected.
“Let’s see what it has cost all told.” He ran over on his fingers the different large items of expense that the great Idea had involved: “The theater building eight hundred, the first year in New York two hundred, Chicago . . . one million six hundred thousand odd for Louisiana!” Brainard concluded whimsically. “And she’s not yet launched. Our kind of art comes high, Ned!”