“If I promise to look after the bag,” Sylvia asked, “will you promise to discourage Tom?”
“But, my dear, why should you carry my bag when I can get Tom to do it?”
“It bores me to see you and him together,” Sylvia explained. “These boys in the company are all very well, but they aren’t really men at all.”
“I know,” Lily said, eagerly. “That’s what I feel. They don’t seem real to me. Of course, I shouldn’t let anybody make love to me seriously.”
“What do you call serious love-making?”
“Oh, Sylvia, how you do go on asking questions. You know perfectly well what I mean. You only ask questions to make me feel uncomfortable.”
“Just as I might disarrange the cushions of your chair?”
“I know quite well who’s been at you to worry me,” Lily went on. “I know it’s Dorothy. She’s always been used to being the eldest and finding fault with everybody else. She doesn’t really mind Tom’s kissing me—she’s perfectly ready to make use of him herself—but she’s always thinking about other people and she’s so afraid that some of the men she goes out with will laugh at his waistcoat. I’m used to actors; she isn’t. I never bother about her. I don’t complain about her practising her singing or talking for hours and hours about whether I think she looks better with a teardrop or without. Why can’t she let me alone? Nobody ever lets me alone. It’s all I’ve ever asked all my life.”
The feeling between Lily and Dorothy was reaching the point of tension. Sylvia commented on it one evening to Fay Onslow, the oldest member of the chorus, a fat woman, wise and genial, universally known as Onzie except by her best boy of the moment, who had to call her Fay. However, she cost him very little else, and was generally considered to throw herself away, though, of course, as her friends never failed to add, she was getting on and could no longer afford to be too particular.
“Well, between you and I, Sylvia, I’ve often wondered you’ve kept your little family together for so long. I’ve been on the stage now for twenty-five years. I’m not far off forty, dear. I used to be in burlesque at the old Frivolity.”