Twenty minutes later we saunter on with a store of minute information regarding Miss Brette's performance, and how it was enjoyed by the world at large, but with our minds still in Darkest Africa so far as the business of the meeting is concerned.
Most people are self-conscious when they speak highly of themselves. Not so actors, to whom such statements as "Everybody said I was the best they had ever seen" or "Alan Dale came three nights running just to watch me" are simply a matter of course. Long thought in this strain has so accustomed the people of the stage to talking in the same fashion that they find nothing extraordinary about it. Then, too, his distorted sense of proportion makes the actor see himself so large and the rest of the world so small that he cannot conceive of any mind which will not grasp, with unalloyed delight, at first-hand information regarding himself. Newspapers have flattered your average histrion into the idea that an eager humanity waits impatiently for accounts of his most unimportant doings. During the term of my press agency, a certain comedienne whose specialty is burnt cork ran after me along Broadway one afternoon, crying: "Stop! I've got a great news 'story' for you."
[Illustration: "_The actor sees himself so large, and the rest of the world so small_"]
"A man came up to me as I was leaving the stage door and said: 'Why, you're not really colored, after all!'"
A star of my acquaintance recently dismissed an excellent business manager because that individual mentioned the author of the play in his advertising. "You're not working for Scribble; you're working for me", was his comment. Another has ceased to be a friend because I told him that I didn't care for his performance. A third has clippings of the criticisms that have treated him best pasted on the inside of his card case and shows them to you if he can get your ear and your button-hole.
Everybody talks shop a good deal, but shop is the _only_ thing talked on The Great White Way. Art and science and literature, politics and wars and national calamities have no interest, if they have so much as existence, for the player. "Awful catastrophe that earthquake in 'Frisco!" I exclaimed to an intimate I met at breakfast five or six years ago.