him!”

“People don’t talk like that,” she told the author, in a quiet aside, during rehearsal. “Especially women. They couldn’t. They use quite commonplace idiom when they’re excited.”

“Thanks,” said the author, elaborately polite. “That’s the big scene in the play. It’ll be a knockout.”

When Harrietta tried to speak these lines in rehearsal she began to giggle and ended in throwing up the ridiculous part. They gave it to that little Frankie Langdon, and the playwright’s prophecy came true. The breast-beating scene was a knockout. It ran for two years in New York alone. Langdon’s sables, chinchillas, ermines, and jewels were always sticking out from the pages