On Riply’s suggestion that several other girls wouldn’t be pleased at being left out, Basil introduced a maid and a cook, “who could just sort of look in from the kitchen.” He rejected firmly Riply’s further proposal that there should be two or three maids, “a sort of sewing woman,” and a trained nurse. In a house so clogged with femininity even the most umbrageous of gentleman burglars would have difficulty in moving about.
“I’ll tell you two people we won’t have,” Basil said meditatively—“that’s Joe Gorman and Hubert Blair.”
“I wouldn’t be in it if we had Hubert Blair,” asserted Riply.
“Neither would I.”
Hubert Blair’s almost miraculous successes with girls had caused Basil and Riply much jealous pain.
They began calling up the prospective cast and immediately the enterprise received its first blow. Imogene Bissel was going to Rochester, Minnesota, to have her appendix removed, and wouldn’t be back for three weeks.
They considered.
“How about Margaret Torrence?”
Basil shook his head. He had vision of Leilia Van Baker as someone rarer and more spirited than Margaret Torrence. Not that Leilia had much being, even to Basil—less than the Harrison Fisher girls pinned around his wall at school. But she was not Margaret Torrence. She was no one you could inevitably see by calling up half an hour before on the phone.
He discarded candidate after candidate. Finally a face began to flash before his eyes, as if in another connection, but so insistently that at length he spoke the name.
“Evelyn Beebe.”
“Who?”
Though Evelyn Beebe was only sixteen, her precocious charms had elevated her to an older crowd and to Basil she seemed of the very generation of his heroine, Leilia Van Baker. It was a little like asking Sarah Bernhardt for her services, but once her name had occurred to him, other possibilities seemed pale.
At noon they rang the Beebes’ doorbell, stricken by a paralysis of embarrassment when Evelyn opened the door herself and, with politeness that concealed a certain surprise, asked them in.
Suddenly, through the portière of the living room, Basil saw and recognized a young man in golf knickerbockers.
“I guess we better not come in,” he said quickly.
“We’ll come some other time,” Riply added.
Together they started precipitately for the door, but she barred their way.
“Don’t be silly,” she insisted. “It’s just Andy Lockheart.”
Just Andy Lockheart—winner of the Western Golf Championship at eighteen, captain of his freshman baseball team, handsome, successful at everything he tried, a living symbol of the splendid, glamorous world of Yale. For a year Basil had walked like him and tried unsuccessfully to play the piano by ear as Andy Lockheart was able to do.
Through sheer ineptitude at escaping, they were edged into the room. Their plan suddenly seemed presumptuous and absurd.
Perceiving their condition Evelyn tried to soothe them with pleasant banter.
“Well it’s about time you came to see me,” she told Basil. “Here I’ve been sitting at home every night waiting for you—ever since the Davies dance. Why haven’t you been here before?”
He stared at her blankly, unable even to smile, and muttered: “Yes, you have.”
“I have though. Sit down and tell me why you’ve been neglecting me! I suppose you’ve both been rushing the beautiful Imogene Bissel.”
“Why, I understand—” said Basil. “Why, I heard from somewhere that she’s gone up to have some kind of an appendicitis—that is—” He ran down to a pitch of inaudibility as Andy Lockheart at the piano began playing a succession of thoughtful chords, which resolved itself into the maxixe, an eccentric stepchild of the tango. Kicking back a rug and lifting her skirts a little, Evelyn fluently tapped out a circle with her heels around the floor.
They sat inanimate as cushions on the sofa watching her. She was almost beautiful, with rather large features and bright fresh color behind which her heart seemed to be trembling a little with laughter. Her voice and her lithe body were always mimicking, ceaselessly caricaturing every sound and movement near by, until even those who disliked her admitted that “Evelyn could always make you laugh.” She finished her dance now with a false stumble and an awed expression as she clutched at the piano, and Basil and Riply chuckled. Seeing their embarrassment lighten, she came and sat down beside them, and they laughed again when she said: “Excuse my lack of self-control.”
“Do you want to be the leading lady in a play we’re going to give?” demanded Basil with sudden desperation. “We’re going to have it at the Martindale School, for the benefit of the Baby Welfare.”
“Basil, this is so sudden.”
Andy Lockheart turned around from the piano.
“What’re you going to give—a minstrel show?”
“No, it’s a crook play named The Captured Shadow. Miss Halliburton is going to coach it.” He suddenly realized the convenience of that name to shelter himself behind.
“Why don’t you give something like ‘The Private Secretary’?” interrupted Andy. “There’s a good play for you. We gave it my last year at school.”
“Oh, no, it’s all settled,” said Basil quickly. “We’re going to put on this play that I wrote.”
“You wrote it yourself?” exclaimed Evelyn.
“Yes.”
“My-y gosh!” said Andy. He began to play again.
“Look, Evelyn,” said Basil. “It’s only for three weeks, and you’d be the leading lady.”
She laughed. “Oh, no. I couldn’t. Why don’t you get Imogene?”
“She’s sick, I tell you. Listen—”
“Or Margaret Torrence?”
“I don’t want anybody but you.”
The directness of this appeal touched her and momentarily she hesitated. But the hero of the Western Golf Championship turned around from the piano with a teasing smile and she shook her head.
“I can’t do it, Basil. I may have to go East with the family.”
Reluctantly Basil and Riply got up.
“Gosh, I wish you’d be in it, Evelyn.”
“I wish I could.”
Basil lingered, thinking fast, wanting her more than ever; indeed, without her, it scarcely seemed worth while to go on with the play. Suddenly a desperate expedient took
