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flames.
    She said with a little laugh, “I’m not Armenian exactly. I’m a Troyan.”
    “Troyan? Do you mean Trojan?”
    “Shakespeare says Troyan. I’m playing Cressida this week.”
    “Shakespeare’s Cressida? Really? Are you an actress?”
    “A sort of one.” She was mimicking me. “The leading lady at the Repertory Theatre is under the weather this week, and they’ve given me her part. I was to play Cassandra.”
    “I can’t see you as Cressida,” I said, and recognized the blunder as soon as I said it.
    “Oh. Warum denn nicht ?” She was enjoying my confusion.
    I blundered on: “She’s a wanton, a light, giddy weathercock of a girl. You’re not, that’s all.”
    “Must an actress commit murder to play Lady Macbeth? Anyway I’m much giddier than you think.”
    “It was a silly thing to say. I take it back.”
    “It was silly,” she said, “since a boy played Cressida in Shakespeare’s day. You might at least reserve your comment until you see me act.”
    “Is there a performance to-night?”
    “Yes.”
    “I’ll come and see you to-night.”
    I had never seen Troilus and Cressida acted on any stage. It is one of the least popular of Shakespeare’s plays because it handles love and honor with gloves off, and calls a spade a dung-fork. Achilles is a treacherous and perverted boar, Troilus a love-sick fool, Helen of Troy an international courtesan, Cressida a two-bit floozie. But Ruth played Cressida with an understanding that gave the play a quality I did not know it had. Her Cressida was a brainless, warm-blooded girl who could not resist the flattery of a handsome lover. She didn’t try to gloss over Cressida’s weakness with tragic effects, but gave her a certain pathos as a victim of environment and her own character. Moving about the stage in her tight bodice and flowing skirts, she was the image of feminine grace without dignity, and affection without consistency or restraint.
    The image depressed me: with a girl who could act like that, you’d never know where you were at. But my depression didn’t prevent me from going to her dressing-room after the final curtain to ask her to have supper with me. I wasn’t the only one who went. The small bare room was full of people laughing and talking in German, and there were masses of flowers on both sides of the dressing-table where Ruth was wiping off her grease-paint.
    I was a stranger and a foreigner and I felt like a fish out of water. But she greeted me gaily and familiarly as if I was an old friend, smiling at me in the mirror.
    “Was I giddy enough, Mr. Branch?”
    “You were wonderful,” I said. “You still are.”
    “Even with grease on my face? Incredible.”
    “You’re incredible, too. Will you have supper with me?”
    “But I’ve just dined with you.”
    “Will you?”
    “Please go away, everybody,” she said in German. “I must change my clothes. Mr. Branch, you may wait for me in the hall if you wish.”
    I waited in the dim hall outside her door and in ten minutes she came out dressed for the street.
    She looked happy and excited, with bright color in her cheeks and flashing eyes. Though the play as a whole had not been liked and the theatre had not been full, her performance had been well received. Especially by me.
    “I think you did a marvelous job,” I said.
    “Thank you. But let’s not talk of it now. I am finished with work for to-day.”
    “I’d like to go some place and celebrate. Where could we go to celebrate?”
    “Celebrate what?”
    “Meeting you. I thought German girls were dull and had thick ankles.”
    “We’re a very giddy lot,” she said. “Giddy, giddy, giddy. I thought American men had long grey beards like Uncle Sam.”
    “I shave mine off every morning but it grows again during the night. Like mushrooms.”
    She laughed, and we went out the stage-door into a side street.
    “I know where we’ll go,” she said.
    She took me to a cabaret where the wine was very good. We were