“Well, le’s go, Florette!” cried Freddy gayly, with dancing eyes.  He had never called her mamma.  She was too little and cute.

Then they would go to the hotel, never the best, where they were stopping.  The room with its greenish light, its soiled lace curtains, the water pitcher always cracked, the bed always lumpy, the sheets always damp, was home to Freddy.  Florette made it warm and cozy even when there was no heat in the radiator.  She had all sorts of clever home-making tricks.  She toasted marshmallows over the gas jet; she spread a shawl on the trunk; or she surprised Freddy by pinning pictures out of the funny page on the wall.  She could make the nicest tea on a little alcohol stove she carried in her trunk.  There was always a little feast after the theatre on the table that invariably wabbled.  Freddy would pretend that the foot of the iron bed was a trapeze.  How they laughed.  On freezing nights in Maine or Minnesota, Florette would let Freddy warm his feet against hers, or she would get up and spread her coat that looked just like fur over the bed.

When they struck a new town at the beginning of each week Freddy and Florette would go bumming and see all the sights, whether it was Niagara Falls or just the new Methodist Church in Cedar Rapids.  Freddy would have been sorry for little boys who had to stay in one home all the time—­that is, if he had known anything at all about them.  But the life of the strolling player was all that he had ever known, and he found it delightful, except for the dreaded intervals of “bookin’ the ac’.”

The dream of every vaudevillian is to be booked for fifty-two unbroken weeks in the year, but few attain such popularity.  Florette’s seasons were sometimes long, sometimes short; but there always came the tedious worrying intervals when managers and agents must be besought for work.  Perhaps she would find that people were tired of her old tricks, and she would have to rehearse new ones, or interpolate new songs and gags.  Then the new act would be tried out at some obscure vaudeville house, and if it didn’t go the rehearsals and trampings to agents must begin all over again.  Freddy shared the anxieties and hardships of these times.  But the only hardship he really minded was the loss of Florette, for of course the pretty Miss Le Fay, who was only nineteen on the agents’ books, could not appear on Broadway with a great big boy like Freddy.

However, the bad times always ended, and Florette and Freddy would set out gayly once more for Oshkosh or Atlanta, Dallas or Des Moines.  Meals expanded, Florette bought a rhinestone-covered comb, and the two adventurers indulged in an orgy of chocolate drops.  With the optimism of the actor, they forgot all about the dismal past weeks, and saw the new tour as never ending.