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. "Let me alone," she said sullenly. Quard started and jerked out a "What?" "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. "What's the matter with you, anyway?" he demanded hotly. [Illustration: "What's the matter with you, anyway?" he demanded, hotly.] "Nothing," she replied quietly; "only I don't want to be pawed." "No?" he exclaimed with sarcasm. "Is that straight?" "Yes, that's straight--and so'm I!" Recollecting himself, Quard attempted to carry off his discomfiture with a shrug and a laugh: "Oh, all right. Don't get huffy. I didn't mean anything." "I know you didn't, but don't do it again." He turned out into the corridor; hesitated. "Well--let it go at that, can't you?" "All right," she said sulkily: "_you_ let it go at that." Quard tramped off without saying anything more, and, whatever his resentment and disappointment, schooled himself to control them, and met her half-way to a reconciliation when the approaching hour of their first public appearance brought them together in the wings. And by this time Joan had been sufficiently diverted by other experiences to have regained her normal poise. The dingy, stuffy, and evil-smelling dressing-room to which she had been assigned had suffered an invasion of three other women: two worn and haggard clog-dancers and a matronly ballad-singer who, having donned an excessively soiled but showy evening gown, had settled down calmly to her knitting: an occupation which had interfered not in the least with her flow of animated and not unkindly gossip. Joan gathered that her voice was the main support of a small family, consisting of a shiftless husband and three children, for the younger of whom the mother was knitting a pair of small, pink bootees. These last had immediately enlisted the sympathetic interest of the clog-dancers, one of whom boasted of the precocity of her only child, a boy of eight living with his grandmother in Omaha, while the other told simply of the death of two children, due to neglect on the part of those to whom she had been obliged to entrust them while on the road....