Sylvia wondered to him why they had never met all these years. She had known so many people on the stage, but then, of course, she had been a good deal out of England. What had made Arthur go on the stage first? He had never talked of it in the old days.
“I used always to be keen on music.”
Sylvia whistled the melody that introduced them to each other, and he smiled again.
“My mother still plays that sometimes, and I’ve often thought of you when she does. She lives at Dulwich now.”
They talked for a while of Hampstead and laughed over the escape.
“You were a most extraordinary kid,” he told her. “Because, after all, I was seventeen at the time—older than you. Good Lord! I’m thirty now, and you must be twenty-eight!”
To Sylvia it was much more incredible that he should be thirty; he seemed so much younger than she, lying here in this frowsy room, or was it that she felt so much older than he?
“But how on earth did you get stranded in this place?” she asked.
“I was touring with a concert party. The last few years I’ve practically given up the stage proper. I don’t know why, really, for I was doing quite decently, but concert-work was more amusing, somehow. One wasn’t so much at the beck and call of managers.”
Sylvia knew, by the careful way in which he was giving his reasons for abandoning the stage, that he had not yet produced the real reason. It might have been baffled ambition or it might have been a woman.