“I suppose I’ve never looked upon those as ‘girls,’” said he. “They’re—machines! machines that eat cherries all day long and chuck the stones all over the floor. Such inefficient ones, too; they——Why d’you laugh, Nancy! I say, you know quite well I don’t mean——”
“Ssh!” came indignantly from under the bonnet—trimmed with squashed heliotropes and doddering jet beads—on the other side of him, as the band struck up the rollicking two-step that heralds the twentieth-century act.
I didn’t cry any more, though.
I believe I was actually less taken up with what was on the stage than with the oddness of my having been behind two sets of scenes myself; with those girls who “couldn’t possibly look upon Still Waters as ‘a man,’ exactly” and then with this man who never really considered typists as “girls.” When had he left off considering me as just a typist? How soon before that evening when we became friends?
Once more I felt grateful to that evening’s compact, as I followed the tall figure with that slight dip from the broad shoulders in to the waist—that line so painfully cultivated by Major Montresor!—and let it make a path for me out of the theatre and to the waiting car.
I believe I’ve always really hated going about London alone, or with just another girl!
* * * * *
“Now, then! Rumpelmayer’s, or the Piccadilly, or where, for tea, Nancy, before I take you on to your friend’s?”
“I meant to have tea with her,” I explained. “I was going on in the bus, and getting down to Sevenoaks afterwards by the dinner-train; saying good-bye to you here.”