Actorviews (1923)

Breakfast with a Perfect Lady jEr~ ?j^n|TRS PATRICIA COLLINGE’S was JB what I may call Irish hospitality — with /j| tact and a bull in it. She invited you Is to luncheon and served you breakfast, V fl which is the only possible meal between li„ . dawn and dinner for a man who works in the night and sleeps “beneath the sun.” Those eggs! Those firmly poached eggs on a substructure of lean amber toast plated with anchovy! . . . . But I am not here to paint a still life nor inform a cook book. For that matter, my delightful entertainer did not attempt to acquire merit through a perfect breakfast. “I tell Blanche,” she said, as Blanche brought round the dish again and helped me help myself to another egg, “what I think I’d like, and Blanche tells me what she thinks I can have.” Blanche, apparently, is the staff at Miss Collinge’s apartment, and a complete one. What with a staff in North Dearborn Street like Blanche and a play at the Blackstone like “Just Suppose,” Miss Patricia Collinge ought to be a very happy girl this season ; and I told her so, and she told me she was. But then I suppose it isn’t nice breakfast manners to talk about your own nice play the very first rattle out of the egg basket; and for a while Miss Collinge glistened with dewy delight in the freshness of “Dulcy,” the play of the bromide lady at the Cort. “After seeing Lynn Fontanne in that diabolic