Louisiana had torn off the blond wig in which she had played Cordelia and tossed it into a corner. She had also removed the embroidered gold bodice of her costume and put on a rumpled dressing sack, and was sitting curled up on her long train, the big puppy in her lap. She was pulling his ears; her brown hair fell about his head. It was plain that she had been crying. “What do you want?” she asked crossly, recognizing Brainard. “I came to—to thank you for helping us in our emergency this evening,” Brainard stammered. “Helping! That’s a smooth word, I must say!” the girl flashed. “You may like that sort of help; but it’s the last you’ll get from me, I reckon!” “I hope not,” Brainard protested heartily. “You saved the performance from being just a soggy failure, anyway.” He could not help smiling at the memory of her saucy antics, yet the picture of childish despair she presented, crumpled, with her hair falling about the puppy’s head, roused another unfamiliar feeling of sympathy and pity. She was such a forlorn little person, for all the bravado of her speech! “Is that what you call saving it?” Louisiana turned the puppy from her lap and devoted all her passion to scorn. “Saving! To make yourself a guy, to be ‘it’ for the merry haw-haws of the smart Alecks in New York! I must say I don’t like your taste. I’d rather fail in some other way.” She pushed back her falling hair and tied it excitedly in a knot, then shrank into her dressing gown and glared at Brainard very much like a kitten that has been cornered and is ruffled, “Let me tell you right here, dear sir, if you are the big gun responsible for this whole show, you haven’t got much to be proud of!” “I heard you say that once before,” Brainard admitted humbly. “You said it was rotten, and I guess it is. But we are going to try to make it better.” “Yes, try! You’d better try. I haven’t seen much acting, but I’ve seen road shows in one-horse towns back in the State of Kansas that could play all over your swell outfit. You think you are uplifting the theater, do you? What do you know about the theater, anyway? You’d better go right out to Iole, or over in the Bowery, and look at a ten-twent’-thirt’ show and learn something about play-acting. This young ladies’ boarding-school sissy show—oh, why did I ever come to you? I’d have learned more in a Kansas City variety!” She crossed the room to hunt up a cigarette, and puffed the smoke with a disdainful shrug of her thin shoulders, walking to and fro in the small dressing room, kicking her dress about like a football, and generally emitting sparks. “So I saved your show from being too awfully dull—at the expense of my reputation!” Brainard could not help laughing at this display of childish vanity. She was a child attempting to be dignified with something more than a child’s intelligence. He suppressed his laughter and let her emotion explode.