Page:Levenson - Butterfly Man.djvu/132

130 "Miss Nasmuth's part," Howard Vee said, taking a sheaf of "sides" from his desk drawer.

"Thank you," Norah smiled.

"I can't dismiss your part so unimportantly," he told Ken. "Will you have dinner with me tonight?"

"Why not?" Ken smiled.

"I intend to build the rôle to suit you," Howard continued. "As written, you'd be a specialty dancer—nothing more. You'd stop the show, get a condescending notice in the Times. I want our audiences to get acquainted with you, not to think of you only as a dancer."

"Wisely spoken," commented Leon.

"We'll meet then—at my hotel at seven-thirty, shall we?" Howard smiled engagingly. Ken nodded. "The Barrington on Madison Avenue," the producer added.

"I'm only twenty-four," Howard Vee laughed. "You talk as if you were already an old man—or at least middle-aged."

"I've lived plenty," Ken said, lighting a cigarette. "Not your sort of living, but bucking hard stone walls, and riding rods and that sort of thing."

"You didn't learn that precise diction in a lumber camp, now did you?"

"No. I once spoke good Texas English. Norah tutored me in stage lingo. I must sound like a rancher born and brought up in dear old London, eh what?"

"And your—I can't find the word—" Howard moistened his lips, "your quality? Where did you get that?"

"That's me. Too much quality. A nasty old man tried to find out how much when I was seventeen, and at eighteen a wicked woman discovered the exact amount."