“Yes, please,” she added, aloud. “Or no, don’t bother him; I’ll come back at ten o’clock.”
Sylvia saw more of the streets of West Kensington in that hour than she had ever seen of them before, and decided that the neighborhood was impossible. Nothing so intolerably monotonous as these rows of stupid and meaningless houses had ever been designed. One after another of them blinked at her in the autumnal sunshine with a fatuous complacency that made her long to ring all the bells in the street. Presently she found herself by the play-fields of St. James’s School, where the last boys were hurrying across the grass like belated ants. She looked at the golden clock in the school-buildings—half past nine. In five hours and a half she would be waiting for the curtain to go up; in seven hours and a half the audience would be wondering if it should have tea in Bond Street or cross Piccadilly and walk down St. James’s Street to Rumpelmayer’s. This problem of the audience began to worry Sylvia. She examined the alternatives with a really anxious gravity. If it went to Rumpelmayer’s it would have to walk back to the Dover Street Tube, which would mean recrossing Piccadilly; on the other hand, it would be on the right side for the omnibuses. On the other hand, it would find Rumpelmayer’s full, because other audiences would have arrived before it, invading the tea-shop from Pall Mall. Sylvia grew angry at the thought of these other audiences robbing her audience of its tea—her audience, some members of which would have read in the paper this morning:
PIERIAN HALL.
This afternoon at 3 p. m.
SYLVIA SCARLETT
IN
IMPROVISATIONS
and would actually have paid, some of them, as much as seven shillings and sixpence to see Sylvia Scarlett. Seven hours and a half: seven shillings and sixpence: 7½ plus 7½ made fifteen. When she was fifteen she had met Arthur. Sylvia’s mind rambled among the omens of numbers, and left her audience still undecided between Bond Street and Rumpelmayer’s, left it upon the steps of the Pierian Hall, the sport of passing traffic, hungry, thirsty, homesick. In seven and a half hours she would know the answer to that breathless question asked a year ago in Vermont. To think that the exact spot on which she had stood when she asked was existing at this moment in Vermont! In seven and a half hours, no, in seven hours and twenty-five minutes; the hands were moving on. It was really terrible how little people regarded the flight of time; the very world might come to an end in seven hours and twenty-five minutes.
“Have you seen Sylvia Scarlett yet?”
“No, we intended to go yesterday, but there were no seats left. They say she’s wonderful.”
“Oh, my dear, she’s perfectly amazing! Of course it’s something quite new. You really must go.”
“Who is she like?”
“Oh, she’s not like anybody else. I’m told she’s half French.”
“Oh, really! How interesting.”