Convinced of their failure, Joan had only succeeded in removing her make-up and struggling into her shabby street clothing, when Quard knocked at the door of her dressing-room. He had played without make-up, and consequently had been able to catch the manager and agent before they could escape. Lounging in the doorway, he breathed a spirit of congratulation strongly tainted with fumes of whiskey.
"We're on!" he declared exultantly. "What'd I _tell_ you? You needn't have changed, because we're going to stick here, and open today. One of the turns on this week's bill fell down at the last minute, and so we cop this chance to fill in. We go on after the first films--about a quarter of one; and then at four-thirty, seven-thirty, ten-forty-five. Now whadda yunno about that?"
Joan gulped and shook her head, her eyes a little misty. For the first time she began to perceive that she had counted desperately on success.
"I think--we're awful' lucky!" she said faintly.
"Lucky nothing! I knew I could get away with it--always providing I had you to play up to."
"That's right. After we'd fixed things up I took Schneider down to the corner and bought him a drink. He said--I dunno as I ought to tell you this, but anyway--he said the sketch was punk (God knows it is) and never would've gone if it hadn't been for you. He said all the women would go crazy about you--you'd got the prettiest shape he'd seen in a month of Sundays. Yunno they get most of their afternoon houses from the women shoppers down here."
He paused and after a moment added meditatively: "Of course, you can't _act_ for shucks."
Joan, looking down, said nothing. Quard dropped a hand intimately across her shoulder and infused a caressing note into his voice.
"I guess I'm a bad little guesser--eh, dearie?"
Joan stood motionless for an instant. His hand seemed as if afire, as if burning through her shirtwaist the flesh of her shoulder. And she resented passionately the intimacy of his tone. Of a sudden she shook his hand off and moved a pace or two away.
"I said, let me alone," she repeated in the same manner, looking him steadily in the face.
He coloured darkly, mumbled something indistinguishable, and flashed into a short-lived fit of temper.