"Doesn't she? On the stage she dresses like an actress, and off the stage she doesn't dress like a lady. She's so extraordinarily vague," he said.
"Yes; and yet I've heard that, though she's so dreamy and romantic, she's quite wonderfully practical, really. She never accepts an engagement unless she gets a large salary—and all that sort of thing."
"I see. She lives in the clouds, but she insists on their having a silver lining," said Vaughan. "Who's the pink young man she's confiding in now?"
"It's Mr. Rathbone. He likes theatres—at least he collects programmes and posters, I think. Besides, he's tattooed."
"Oh, yes. That must be a great help in listening to Miss Luscombe. He's been trained to suffer."
Miss Luscombe was talking rather loudly and most confidentially to Rathbone, who had an expression of willing—but agonised—martyrdom on his fair pink, clean-shaven features.
"I told dear George Alexander that I would have been only too pleased to understudy Irene in the new piece—in fact, it would have just suited me, Mr. Rathbone, and left me plenty of time for my social engagements too. Besides, if I once got a chance of a part like that I feel I should have made a hit. Oh, it was a cruel disappointment! After being too charming to me—or, at any rate, I was charming to him at the Cashmores' reception, you know—I remember he was standing in the refreshment-room with Mrs. Cashmore, and I went straight up to him and said, 'Don't you remember me, Mr. Alexander?'—and after all this he only promised me—and that conditionally—a horrid, silly little part in the curtain-raiser in No. 2 B Company on tour. On tour! Of course I refused that—one must keep up one's prestige, Mr. Rathbone. There's a great deal of injustice in the profession. Talent counts for nothing—it's all influence. But I've always had a great ambition ever since I was a little girl." Miss Luscombe put her head on one side and talked as she had to the interviewer of The Perfect Lady. "It was always my dream—do you know?—to marry a great actor—or, at any rate, to be his great friend—like Irving and Ellen Terry—that sort of thing—a great, lifelong friendship! And as a child I was madly in love with the elder George Grossmith, but I don't think he ever knew it. Too bad!"
She pouted childishly, gave her arch musical laugh with its three soprano notes and upward inflection, and then accepted a quail with a heavy sigh.
"When I was a boy," said Rathbone in a low concentrated voice of reminiscence—he spoke rather quickly, for he had been trying in vain during the whole of dinner to get a word in edgeways and feared to lose his chance now—"when I was a boy I was in love, too, with some one on the stage. Between ourselves—you won't mention it, will you, Miss Luscombe?——"
"You can trust me," she said earnestly, with a look of Julia Neilson.