Though they had come early, she found everything in uproar.  The main performance was under way, the orchestra was playing and the audience intermittently applauding.  The infusion of the amateurs clogged the working of things behind the stage, crowded the passages, dressing rooms, and wings, and forced everybody into everybody else’s way.  This was particularly distasteful to the professionals, who carried themselves as befitted those of a higher caste, and whose behavior toward the pariah amateurs was marked by hauteur and even brutality.  And Edna, bullied and elbowed and shoved about, clinging desperately to her basket and seeking a dressing room, took note of it all.

A dressing room she finally found, jammed with three other amateur “ladies,” who were “making up” with much noise, high-pitched voices, and squabbling over a lone mirror.  Her own make-up was so simple that it was quickly accomplished, and she left the trio of ladies holding an armed truce while they passed judgment upon her.  Letty was close at her shoulder, and with patience and persistence they managed to get a nook in one of the wings which commanded a view of the stage.

A small, dark man, dapper and debonair, swallow-tailed and top-hatted, was waltzing about the stage with dainty, mincing steps, and in a thin little voice singing something or other about somebody or something evidently pathetic.  As his waning voice neared the end of the lines, a large woman, crowned with an amazing wealth of blond hair, thrust rudely past Edna, trod heavily on her toes, and shoved her contemptuously to the side.  “Bloomin’ hamateur!” she hissed as she went past, and the next instant she was on the stage, graciously bowing to the audience, while the small, dark man twirled extravagantly about on his tiptoes.

“Hello, girls!”

This greeting, drawled with an inimitable vocal caress in every syllable, close in her ear, caused Edna to give a startled little jump.  A smooth-faced, moon-faced young man was smiling at her good-naturedly.  His “make-up” was plainly that of the stock tramp of the stage, though the inevitable whiskers were lacking.

“Oh, it don’t take a minute to slap’m on,” he explained, divining the search in her eyes and waving in his hand the adornment in question.  “They make a feller sweat,” he explained further.  And then, “What’s yer turn?”

“Soprano—­sentimental,” she answered, trying to be offhand and at ease.

“Whata you doin’ it for?” he demanded directly.

“For fun; what else?” she countered.

“I just sized you up for that as soon as I put eyes on you.  You ain’t graftin’ for a paper, are you?”

“I never met but one editor in my life,” she replied evasively, “and I, he—­well, we didn’t get on very well together.”

“Hittin’ ’m for a job?”

Edna nodded carelessly, though inwardly anxious and cudgelling her brains for something to turn the conversation.