The People’s would have to do the best they could with second-rate and third-rate people until they had “made good,” or could train their own actors, Brainard reflected. Meanwhile Miss Leroy continued to pipe and Dudley Warner to bawl, interrupted now and then by MacNaughton’s resonant voice from the wings “No, no! That won’t do at all. Begin that once more, Miss Leroy,” etc.
“Ah, it’s rotten! Cut it out!” a voice murmured out of the darkness close to Brainard.
The fresh young voice so near to him startled Brainard, and he turned to see who had spoken. In the gloom he could make out a girl sitting hunched up, with crossed legs, a newspaper on her lap, from which she seemed to be eating her luncheon.
“It _is_ pretty rotten,” Brainard admitted.
“The whole bunch is no account trash, anyway,” the young person continued impersonally, dangling a slice of sausage before her mouth. “Like last year’s grass or yesterday’s supper. But that Jenny! Why, she couldn’t decorate a cemetery properly!”
Thereupon, having disposed of the company, the young woman devoted herself unreservedly to her food, ignoring Brainard’s presence. The next time that the stage manager opened a discussion with Miss Leroy that promised to last for some moments, Brainard turned to the girl.
“Pardon my curiosity,” he said, taking the seat behind her, “but I should like to know how you happen to be here at the rehearsal.”
“Me? Why, I belong!” she replied, with a funny wrinkling of her small lips. “I’m part of it—this great uplift movement for the American drá-ma!”
“And a lot of other things,” the young woman admitted frankly. “Highbrows and amateurs and boneheads and—”
“I don’t know you, and I thought I had met every one in the company.”
“I’m not in the front row, you see. I am what they call a nee-o-phyte—a pupil in the Actors’ College, when there is any college.”
“Oh, I remember now!” Brainard said, recalling the first and only pupil enrolled. “Your name is—”
“Delacourt—Louisiana Delacourt,” the girl rolled out with gusto, as if she enjoyed her name, and hadn’t many opportunities of using it.
The slightly Southern accent of the girl set puzzling currents of memory at work in Brainard’s mind. He looked at her more closely, but in the dim light of the auditorium could not make out distinctly the face which was shrouded in one of the inverted “peach-basket” hats of the period. She seemed a slight little body.