Show Boat by Edna Ferber

to convey to him its correct reading. After rehearsal, Julie could be heard going over the line again and again.
    “Who has a better
right!
“Steve would thunder, dramatically.
    “No, dear. The accent is on ‘better.’ Like this: ‘Who has a
better
right!’ ”
    Steve’s blue eyes would be very earnest, his face red with effort. “Oh, I see. Come down hard on ‘better,’ huh? ‘Who has a better
right!
’ ”
    It was useless.
    The two were very much in love. The others in the company sometimes teased them about this, but not often. Julie and Steve did not respond to this badinage gracefully. There existed between the two a relation that made the outsider almost uncomfortable. When they looked at each other, there vibrated between them a current that sent a little shiver through the beholder. Julie’s eyes were deep-set and really black, and there was about them a curious indefinable quality. Magnolia liked to look into their soft and mournful depths. Her own eyes were dark, but not like Julie’s. Perhaps it was the whites of Julie’s eyes that were different.
    Magnolia had once seen them kiss. She had come upon them quietly and unexpectedly, on deck, in the dusk. Certainly she had never witnessed a like passage of love between her parents; and even her recent familiarity with stage romance had not prepared her for it. It was long before the day of the motion picture fade-out. Olga Nethersole’s famous osculation was yet to shock a Puritan America. Steve had held Julie a long long minute, wordlessly. Her slimness had seemed to melt into him. Julie’s eyes were closed. She was quite limp as he tipped her upright. She stood thus a moment, swaying, her eyes still shut. When she opened them they were clouded, misty, as were his. The two then beheld a staring and fascinated little girl quite palpably unable to move from the spot. Julie had laughed a little low laugh. She had not flushed, exactly. Her sallow colouring had taken on a tone at once deeper and clearer and brighter, like amber underlaid with gold. Her eyes had widened until they were enormousin her thin dark glowing face. It was as though a lamp had been lighted somewhere behind them.
    “What makes you look like that?” Magnolia had demanded, being a forthright young person.
    “Like what?” Julie had asked.
    “Like you do. All—all shiny.”
    “Love,” Julie had answered, quite simply. Magnolia had not in the least understood; but she remembered. And years later she did understand.
    Besides Elly, the ingénue, Schultzy, juvenile lead, Julie and Steve, character team, there were Mr. and Mrs. Means, general business team, Frank, the heavy, and Ralph, general utility man. Elly and Schultzy sat at table with the Hawkses, the mark of favour customary to their lofty theatrical eminence. The others of the company, together with Doc, and three of the band members, sat at the long table in the centre of the room. Mrs. Means played haughty dowagers, old Kentucky crones, widows, mothers, and middle-aged females. Mr. Means did bankers, Scrooges, old hunters and trappers, comics, and the like.
    At the table nearest the door and the kitchen sat the captain and crew of the
Mollie Able
. There were no morning newspapers to read between sips of coffee; no mail to open. They were all men and women of experience. They had knocked about the world. In their faces was a lived look, together with an expression that had in it a curiously child-like quality. Captain Andy was not far wrong in his boast that they were like one big family—a close and jealous family needing no outside stimulus for its amusement. They wereextraordinarily able to amuse themselves. Their talk was racy, piquant, pungent. The women were, for the most part, made of sterner stuff than the men—that is, among the actors. That the men had chosen this drifting, carefree, protected life, and were satisfied with it, proved that. Certainly Julie was a force stronger than Steve; Elly made a slave of