It was a fact that he had grown a trifle afraid of her.
The discovery impressed her as so absurd that she smiled; and instantly the man was himself again. He thrust out a hand, to which with covert reluctance she entrusted her own.
"Good enough. Let's see what kind of a house we've got."
He found a peep-hole near the proscenium arch and peered intently through it for a moment or two; then beckoned Joan to take his place. But she could make but little of what seemed a dark well filled with flickering shadows. She turned away.
"Only a handful out there," Quard assured her. "It's too early for much of a crowd. No good getting nervous about this bunch."
And she wasn't; no less to her own surprise than to Quard's, she was conscious of no trace of the stage-fright she had heard so much about. Indeed a singular feeling of indifference and disappointment oppressed her; it was all so unlike what she had looked forward to as the setting for her first appearance in public. The dreary and tawdry atmosphere behind the scenes of the dilapidated little theatre; the weary and subdued accents in which her dressing-room associates had discussed their offspring; the _tinkle-tankle-tinkle-whang_ of a painfully automatic piano in the orchestra-pit; her own shabby second-hand costume; the brutal grotesqueness of Quard's painted countenance at close range--these owned little in common with those anticipations roused by the glitter and glamour of that fleshy show on the New York Theatre roof garden. She felt cheated; in perspective, even the stocking-counter seemed less uninviting....
A muffled outbreak of laughter and brief murmur of applause filtered through the curtain. The piano stopped with a crash. Quard nodded and, touching her elbow, urged her toward the entrance.
"Film's finished. Ready and steady, old girl."
"I'm all right," she said sullenly. "Don't you worry about me."
She heard the curtain rise with a rustling as of mighty wings penetrated by the shrill squeal of an ungreased block; held back a moment; and walked on, into a dazzling glare of footlights, conscious of no emotion whatever beyond desire to get finished with her part and return to the dressing-room. At the designated spot, near the centre of the stage, she paused, faced the audience with her trained smile and mouthed the opening lines with precisely the proper intonation....