“You look as if you had only just got up,” remarked Bertha, as she gave him her hand. “Not a bit as though you’d been through the fatigues and worries and the heat and burden of the day.”
“Oh, that’s too bad!” he answered. “You know perfectly well I always get up in time to see the glorious sunset! Why this reproach? I don’t know that I’ve ever seen you very early in the day; I always regard you less as a daughter of the morning than as a minion of the moon.”
“How is Mrs. Hillier?” replied Bertha rather coldly.
“All right—I promise I won’t. Mary? Why Mary is well—very well—but just, perhaps, a teeny bit trying—just a shade wearing. No—no, I don’t mean that. … Well, I’m at your service for the play and so on. Shall I write to Rupert Denison and Miss Irwin? And will you all come and dine with me, and where shall we go?”
“Don’t you think something thrilling and exciting and emotional—or, perhaps, something light and frivolous?”
“For Rupert I advise certainly the trivial, the flippant. It would have a better effect. Why not go to the new Revue—‘That will be Fourpence’—where they have the two young Simultaneous Dancers, the Misses Zanie and Lunie Le Face—one, I fancy, is more simultaneous than the other, I forget which. They are delightful, and will wake Denison up. In fact, I don’t know who they wouldn’t wake up, they make such a row. They dance and sing, about Dixie and Honey and coons—and that sort of thing. They sing quite well, too—I mean for them.”
“But not for us? … No, I don’t want to take him with Madeline to anything that could be called a music-hall—something more correct for a jeune fille would be better. …”
“To lead to a proposal, you mean. Well, we’d better fall back upon His Majesty’s or Granville Barker. Poor Charlie! It’s hard lines on that boy, Bertha—he’s really keen on Miss Irwin.”
“I know; but what can we do? It’s Rupert Denison she cares about.”
“Likes him, does she?” said Nigel.