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Phillips, David Graham

"Susan Lenox"


"Oh, you sit tight, Mame," jeered the boy. He opened a solid
door behind him. Through the crack Susan saw busily writing at
a table desk a bald, fat man with a pasty skin and a veined and
bulbous nose.
"Lady to see you," said the boy in a tone loud enough for both
Susan and the actress to hear.
"Who? What name?" snapped the man, not ceasing or looking up.
"She's young, and a queen," said the boy. "Shall I show her in?"
"Yep."
The actress started up. "Mr. Blynn----" she began in a loud,
threatening, elocutionary voice.
"'Lo, Mame," said Blynn, still busy. "No time to see you.
Nothing doing. So long."
"But, Mr. Blynn----"
"Bite it off, Mame," ordered the boy. "Walk in, miss."
Susan, deeply colored from sympathy with the humiliated actress
and from nervousness in those forbidding and ominous
surroundings, entered the private office. The boy closed the
door behind her. The pen scratched on. Presently the man said:
"Well, my dear, what's your name?"
With the last word, the face lifted and Susan saw a seamed and
pitted skin, small pale blue eyes showing the white, or rather
the bloodshot yellow all round the iris, a heavy mouth and jaw,
thick lips; the lower lip protruded and was decorated with a
blue-black spot like a blood boil, as if to indicate where the
incessant cigar usually rested. At first glance into Susan's
sweet, young face the small eyes sparkled and danced, traveled
on to the curves of her form.


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