The Call of the Cumberlands

At eleven o'clock the guests of honor arrived in a taxicab. They were

Mr. William Farbish and Miss Winifred Starr. Having come, as they

explained, direct from the theater where Miss Starr danced in the first

row, they were in evening dress. Samson mentally acknowledged, though,

with instinctive disfavor for the pair, that both were, in a way,

handsome. Collasso drew him aside to whisper importantly: "Make yourself agreeable to Farbish. He is received in the most

exclusive society, and is a connoisseur of art. He is a connoisseur in

all things," added the Italian, with a meaning glance at the girl.

"Farbish has lived everywhere," he ran on, "and, if he takes a fancy to

you, he will put you up at the best clubs. I think I shall sell him a

landscape."

The girl was talking rapidly and loudly. She had at once taken the

center of the room, and her laughter rang in free and egotistical peals

above the other voices.

"Come," said the host, "I shall present you."

The boy shook hands, gazing with his usual directness into the show

-girl's large and deeply-penciled eyes. Farbish, standing at one side

with his hands in his pockets, looked on with an air of slightly bored

detachment.

His dress, his mannerisms, his bearing, were all those of the man who

has overstudied his part. They were too perfect, too obviously

rehearsed through years of social climbing, but that was a defect

Samson was not yet prepared to recognize.

Some one had naïvely complimented Miss Starr on the leopard-skin cloak

she had just thrown from her shapely shoulders, and she turned promptly

and vivaciously to the flatterer.

"It is nice, isn't it?" she prattled. "It may look a little up-stage

for a girl who hasn't got a line to read in the piece, but these days

one must get the spot-light, or be a dead one. It reminds me of a

little run-in I had with Graddy--he's our stage-director, you know."

She paused, awaiting the invitation to proceed, and, having received

it, went gaily forward. "I was ten minutes late, one day, for

rehearsal, and Graddy came up with that sarcastic manner of his, and

said: 'Miss Starr, I don't doubt you are a perfectly nice girl, and all

that, but it rather gets my goat to figure out how, on a salary of

fifteen dollars a week, you come to rehearsals in a million dollars'

worth of clothes, riding in a limousine--and ten minutes late!'"

She broke off with the eager little expression of awaiting applause,

and, having been satisfied, she added: "I was afraid that wasn't going

to get a laugh, after all."