“I’m really very sorry, O’Finn, but if you will go on talking like that, I simply can’t help laughing.”
At this moment Nancy herself entered the sitting-room.
“Hello, boys, what’s the joke? Do tell a pal,” she cried in a radiance of good-fellowship.
The heavy father sank down into one of Mrs. Prattman’s armchairs and buried his head in his knees.
“It isn’t a joke at all, Nancy. It’s very serious. Your father won’t hear of letting us get married, he says we’re too young.”
“The dear old duffer,” said Nancy. “Why, then we’ll just have to get married without saying any more about it.”
“Never!” thundered the heavy father, springing to his feet.
“Then I’ll go back to Aunt Kathleen,” Nancy vowed. “If I’m old enough to make love on the stage, I’m old enough to make love off it.”
Michael O’Finn, having taken up this attitude in his lodgings, could not resist elaborating it before the performance in the cosy little saloon bar of the “Saracen’s Head” just round the corner from the stage-door. The result was that his delivery of Jacques’s great speech in the Forest of Arden lost much of its austere melancholy and most of its articles definite and indefinite. A pronounced thickening of all the sibilants with a quantity of unnecessary tears left Jacques himself, at the end of that strange eventful history, in a state of mere oblivion and apparently sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. When the curtain fell on the second act, Mrs. Hunter-Hart, who had been watching him from the wings, invited her heavy man to step up to her dressing-room and explain what he meant by it.
“I am ecsheedingly dishtreshed, Mrs. Hart, but a domeshtic mishfortune overtook me thish afternoon and I’m afraid that I drank rather more than wash good for me in the ‘Sharashen’s Head.’”