miling
faces of the audience, where men and women and children, hardened
theater-goers and folk fresh from the country, sat with moving lips
and faces lit with an eager interest and sympathy for the black man
strutting in loose-footed vivacity before them.

"He's simply unique," he boasted to wondering local managers--"unique,
and it took me to find him. There he was, a little black gold-mine,
and all of 'em passed him by until I came. Some eye? What? I guess
you'll admit you have to hand it some to your Uncle Felix. If that
coon's health holds out, we'll have all the money there is in the
mint."

That was Felix's real anxiety--"If his health holds out." Gideon's
health was watched over as if he had been an ailing prince. His
bubbling vivacity was the foundation upon which his charm and his
success were built. Stuhk became a sort of vicarious neurotic,
eternally searching for symptoms in his protege; Gideon's tongue,
Gideon's liver, Gideon's heart were matters to him of an unfailing
and anxious interest. And of late--of course it might be imagination
--Gideon had shown a little physical falling off. He ate a bit less,
he had begun to move in a restless way, and, worst of all, he laughed
less frequently.

As a matter of fact, there was ground for Stuhk's apprehension. It was
not all a matter of managerial imagination: Gideon was less himself.
Physically there was nothing the matter with him; he could have passed
his rigid insurance scrutiny as easily as he had done months before,
when his life and health had been insured for a sum that made good
copy for his press-agent. He was sound in every organ, but there was
something lacking in general tone. Gideon felt it himself, and was
certain that a "misery," that embracing indisposition of his race, was
creeping upon him. He had been fed well, too well; he was growing
rich, too rich; he had all the praise, all the flattery that his
enormous appetite for approval desired, and too much of it. White men
sought him out and made much of him; white women talked to him about
his career; and wherever he went, women of color--black girls, brown
girls, yellow girls--wrote him of their admiration, whispered, when he
would listen, of their passion and hero-worship. "City niggers" bowed
down before him; the high gallery was always packed with them.
Musk-scented notes scrawled upon barbaric, "high-toned" stationery
poured in upon him. Even a few white women, to his horror and
embarras