Page:Wilson - Merton of the Movies (1922).djvu/81

 She was a harum-scarum baggage with no proper respect for any one, he decided, especially after the day she had so rudely accosted one of the passing directors. He was a more than usually absorbed director, and with drawn brows would have gone unseeing through the waiting room when the girl hailed him.

"Oh, Mr. Henshaw, one moment please!"

He glanced up in some annoyance, pausing with his hand to the door that led on to his proper realm.

"Oh, it's you, Miss Montague! Well, what is it? I'm very, very busy."

"Well, it's something I wanted to ask you." She quickly crossed the room to stand by him, tenderly flecking a bit of dust from his coat sleeve as she began, "Say, listen, Mr. Henshaw: Do you think beauty is a curse to a poor girl?"

Mr. Henshaw scowled down into the eyes so confidingly lifted to his.

"That's something you won't ever have to worry about," he snapped, and was gone, his brows again drawn in perplexity over his work.

"You're not angry with poor little me, are you, Mr. Henshaw?"

The girl called this after him and listened, but no reply came from back of the partition.

Mrs. Montague, from the bench, rebuked her daughter.

"Say, what do you think that kidding stuff will get you? Don't you want to work for him any more?"

The girl turned pleading eyes upon her mother.

"I think he might have answered a simple question," said she.

This was all distasteful to Merton Gill. The girl might, indeed, have deserved an answer to her simple question, but why need she ask it of so busy a man? He felt that Mr. Henshaw's rebuke was well merited, for her own beauty was surely not excessive.

Her father, from the bench, likewise admonished her.

"You are sadly prone to a spirit of banter," he declared,