Page:Wilson - Merton of the Movies (1922).djvu/175

 forward again in his direction. He would have liked to evade her but saw that he could not do this gracefully.

She greeted him with an impudent grin. "Why, hello, trouper! As I live, the actin' Kid!" She held out a hand to him and he could not well refuse it. He would have preferred to "up-stage" her once more, as she had phrased it in her low jargon, but he was cornered. Her grip of his hand quite astonished him with its vigour.

"Well, how's everything with you? Everything jake?"

He tried for a show of easy confidence. "Oh, yes, yes, indeed, everything is."

"Well, that's good, Kid." But she was now without the grin, and was running a practised eye over what might have been called his production. The hat was jaunty enough, truly a hat of the successful, but all below that, the not-too-fresh collar, the somewhat rumpled coat, the trousers crying for an iron despite their nightly compression beneath their slumbering owner, the shoes not too recently polished, and, more than all, a certain hunted though still-defiant look in the young man's eyes, seemed to speak eloquently under the shrewd glance she bent on him.

"Say, listen here, Old-timer, remember I been trouping man and boy for over forty year and it's hard to fool me—you working?"

He resented the persistent levity of manner, but was coerced by the very apparent real kindness in her tone. "Well," he looked about the set vaguely in his discomfort, "you see, right now I'm between pictures—you know how it is."

Again she searched his eyes and spoke in a lower tone: "Well, all right—but you needn't blush about it, Kid." The blush she detected became more flagrant.

"Well, I—you see" he began again, but he was saved from being explicit by the call of an assistant director.

"Miss Montague, Miss Montague—where's that Flips girl on the set, please." She skipped lightly from him. When she returned a little later to look for him he had gone.