"Serve him right," said Sylvia.
"But I shouldn't like to think that he was really suffering on my account."
"Lily and I are the only people who really suffer," said Sylvia.
"What do you mean?"
"My dear Dorothy, we have to listen to the practising."
"You don't really mind my practising, do you?"
"I get rather bored with it sometimes."
"Yes, I suppose it is rather boring sometimes."
Dorothy decided that it was also rather boring of Sylvia to switch the topic from her effect on David Bligh to the slight annoyance her practising might sometimes cause her friends. However, she forgave her by remembering that Sylvia had not the same inducement as herself to study singing.
Meanwhile, Dorothy's occupation of the leading man left Lily free to develop her deplorable taste for chorus-boys, and Dorothy found that her own habit of practising scales in the morning and going out for walks with David Bligh in the afternoon had resulted in continuous tea-parties at their rooms, to which, whenever she wanted to stay at home in the afternoon, she was most unfairly exposed. She might have put up with Lily's behavior for the rest of the tour if at last a moment had not come when it inconvenienced her personally. At Nottingham, which the company reached in mid-April, the weather was so fine that Dorothy accepted an invitation from an admirer in the front of the house to go for a picnic on the river Trent. Until now she had discouraged all introductions effected by the footlights, and she often marveled to Sylvia at the way other girls accepted invitations to private houses without knowing anything about their hosts. Perhaps she was already beginning to feel that David Bligh had taught her all he knew about voice-production, or perhaps the exceptionally smart automobile grumbling outside the stage-door struck her as a proper credential, or perhaps these April airs were irresistible.