The Jewel Box by Anna Davis Page A

finished. In a year or two, the actors will all be speaking. So even their voices won’t be left to the imagination. That will make them all the more ordinary.”
    “Do you think it’ll take off? Talking pictures?”
    “Oh, certainly,” said Grace. “Mark my words. And just watch for the careers that will come crashing down. Talking pictures will require an entirely different sort of acting. The big stars of the future will be our best English theater actors, you wait and see.”
    “You have it all worked out, don’t you?” O’Connell put a fat cigar into his mouth.
    “I’m not afraid to speak out. It’s the way I was brought up. Mummy and Daddy always encouraged us to question assumptions, form our own views.”
    “Us?”
    “Me and my sister.”
    “Ah yes, that whole routine. Diamond and Sapphire…”
    But Grace had wandered off on her own train of thought. “Perhaps that’s why I’m not married. I’m argumentative. I won’t let any man push me around or tell me what to think. I suppose that makes me a bit of a handful.”
    “Well, I don’t know about pushing you around. How about we get out of here now and I dance you around a little at some fashionable establishment? Might that appeal to your idiosyncratic and thoroughly single-minded self?”
    “Oh, rather!” And before she could get control of it, the excitement lit up her face like a child’s.
    “He has the nicest voice.” Margaret had cream on the end of her nose, from the gâteau. Grace was trying to signal its presence to her but she seemed oblivious—giving attention only to her own story. “Musical—you know what I mean? Writers aren’t always good readers. The two things don’t necessarily go together. But O’Connell…he has a quality. You could imagine him on the stage. He’s very obviously somebody. If he wasn’t a writer, he’d be famous for something else.”
    “I’d better get the bill.” Grace checked her watch. “We have to get back.”
    “I’m so jealous of you!” Margaret was all eyes— huge eyes—behind those glasses of hers. “I’ve often imagined bumping into him somewhere. Just, you know, bumping into him. And he’d look down at me and he’d say—”
    “That’s what happened to me.” Grace smiled. “I bumped into him.”
    But Margaret wasn’t listening. “I suppose this is the closest I’ll ever get to being alone with him. This lunch with you, Imean. When I come to read your interview, I’ll recognize my own questions, the things I’ve told you. It’ll be as though I’m talking to him myself, but through you. As though you were some sort of medium for our two spirits.”
    “Steady on.” Grace glanced again at her watch.
    “Sorry, Grace.” There it was again—that overfamiliarity…“His books mean the world to me, that’s all.”
    “Oh, good.” The bill had arrived and Grace went fumbling in her purse.
    “When does it come out? The article? It’ll be funny, seeing your name in the newspaper. ‘Interview by Grace Rutherford.’ Imagine what they’ll say at Pearson’s!”
    “Ah.” Grace emerged from her handbag. “There’s something I shall have to tell you on that front. It’s quite a secret.”
    “Really? Do tell. You can trust me.”
    “Well, the thing is, I write a column for the Herald under a fake name…”
    Margaret still had that blob of cream on her nose. Perhaps it would be there for the rest of the day.
    His Charleston was impressive—but then, how would it ever have been anything else? He, the inventor of the flapper, the bad boy of American literature, dancing companion of all those bejeweled lovelies with the fat husbands who’d no doubt have lurked in corners, watching jealously. She couldn’t imagine him needing lessons with Teenie Weenie. He fairly whirled her about the Lido Club so that she felt her feet were hardly touching the floor. He made her feel she weighed nothing—inside as well as out, for her emotions were spinning all about her so that