Cheerful - By Request | Page 3

the abbreviated costume in which
Cora Kassell used so generously to display her charms. A rich and
portly society matron of Pittsburgh now--she whose name had been a
synonym for pulchritude these thirty years; she who had had more cold
creams, hats, cigars, corsets, horses, and lotions named for her than any
woman in history! Her ample girth would have wrought sad havoc with
that eighteen-inch waist now. Gone are the chaste curves of the slim
white silk legs that used to kick so lithely from the swirl of lace and
chiffon. Yet there it hangs, pertly pathetic, mute evidence of her
vanished youth, her delectable beauty, and her unblushing confidence
in those same.

Up one aisle and down the next--velvet, satin, lace and
broadcloth--here the costume the great Canfield had worn in Richard
III; there the little cocked hat and the slashed jerkin in which Maude
Hammond, as Peterkins, winged her way to fame up through the hearts
of a million children whose ages ranged from seven to seventy.
Brocades and ginghams; tailor suits and peignoirs; puffed sleeves and
tight--dramatic history, all, they spelled failure, success, hope, despair,
vanity, pride, triumph, decay. Tragic ghosts, over which Josie Fifer
held grim sway!
Have I told you that Josie Fifer, moving nimbly about the great
storehouse, limped as she went? The left leg swung as a normal leg
should. The right followed haltingly, sagging at hip and knee. And that
brings us back to the reason for her being where she was. And what.
The story of how Josie Fifer came to be mistress of the cast-off robes of
the firm of Hahn & Lohman is one of those stage tragedies that never
have a public performance. Josie had been one of those little girls who
speak pieces at chicken-pie suppers held in the basement of the
Presbyterian church. Her mother had been a silly, idle woman addicted
to mother hubbards and paper-backed novels about the house. Her one
passion was the theatre, a passion that had very scant opportunity for
feeding in Wapello, Iowa. Josie's piece-speaking talent was evidently a
direct inheritance. Some might call it a taint.
Two days before one of Josie's public appearances her mother would
twist the child's hair into innumerable rag curlers that stood out in
grotesque, Topsy-like bumps all over her fair head. On the eventful
evening each rag chrysalis would burst into a full-blown butterfly curl.
In a pale-blue, lace-fretted dress over a pale-blue slip, made in what her
mother called "Empire style," Josie would deliver herself of
"Entertaining Big Sister's Beau" and other sophisticated classics with
an incredible ease and absence of embarrassment. It wasn't a definite
boldness in her. She merely liked standing there before all those people,
in her blue dress and her toe slippers, speaking her pieces with
enhancing gestures taught her by her mother in innumerable rehearsals.
Any one who has ever lived in Wapello, Iowa, or its equivalent,

remembers the old opera house on the corner of Main and Elm, with
Schroeder's drug store occupying the first floor. Opera never came
within three hundred miles of Wapello, unless it was the so-called
comic kind. It was before the day of the ubiquitous moving-picture
theatre that has since been the undoing of the one-night stand and the
ten-twenty-thirty stock company. The old red-brick opera house
furnished unlimited thrills for Josie and her mother. From the time
Josie was seven she was taken to see whatever Wapello was offered in
the way of the drama. That consisted mostly of plays of the
tell-me-more-about-me-mother type.
By the time she was ten she knew the whole repertoire of the Maude La
Vergne Stock Company by heart. She was _blasé_ with "East Lynne"
and "The Two Orphans," and even "Camille" left her cold. She was as
wise to the trade tricks as is a New York first nighter. She would sit
there in the darkened auditorium of a Saturday afternoon, surveying the
stage with a judicious and undeceived eye, as she sucked indefatigably
at a lollipop extracted from the sticky bag clutched in one moist palm.
(A bag of candy to each and every girl; a ball or a top to each and every
boy!) Josie knew that the middle-aged soubrette who came out between
the first and second acts to sing a gingham-and-sunbonnet song would
whisk off to reappear immediately in knee-length pink satin and curls.
When the heroine left home in a shawl and a sudden snowstorm that
followed her upstage and stopped when she went off, Josie was
interested, but undeceived. She knew that the surprised-looking white
horse used in the Civil War comedy-drama entitled "His Southern
Sweetheart" came from Joe Brink's livery stable in exchange for four
passes, and that the faithful old negro servitor in the white cotton wig