“They dealt with the Germans instead,” Brainard laughed. “It might have paid better to stick by the old man to the end? . . . So, after we parted at Vera Cruz, you went back to the stage—into the legitimate?”
“Mr. Hollinger suggested it when I met him at Jalapa. He got me a place in one of the San Francisco theaters a friend of his was running, and then later on when he went into the show business himself, he took me for one of his companies.”
“It’s as good as anything else,” the leading lady replied, “so long as you’ve got to work for your living.”
“Unless we are clever enough to get somebody else to do the work for us,” she sneered.
“What’s the use of your taking that lofty tone with me?”
Brainard laughed good-naturedly. He found in this case, as he had in so many others, that a little personal contact with an enemy modifies and humanizes any antagonism. “Eat with an enemy and lose your hate,” is an old proverb, the truth of which he was proving. In spite of the hardness and vulgarity of Miss Lorilla Walters, actress and stenographer, there was something pathetic in her commonplace struggle with life, which he felt through her brief admissions. She had been fighting all her life for herself with somewhat coarse weapons, the only ones she knew how to use, and her appearance, now that she had lost the advantage of youth and was declining towards middle age, her cheap clothes, her defiant manner,—all told of the losing game. He was already beginning to wonder what he could do for Krutzmacht’s old stenographer, wondering whether by any chance she could be fitted into the People’s company, when his amiable meditations were disagreeably interrupted by the actress.
“It’s no use your playing the great philanthropist with me,” she said truculently. “I know what you are.”
“The trouble always has been from the moment I entered Krutzmacht’s office that afternoon that you have persisted in this wrong idea. You took me for a common thief then, and you think me a successful swindler now. Well, it happens that I am neither. So you can’t understand!”
She looked over the comfortable room, which for the moment they had to themselves, as Farson had taken Hollinger into the library.
“You seem to have done very well by yourself,” she observed.