It was a first-night performance; the place was packed. Desire at once became interested in the audience, spying round with her glasses and picking out the critics, the actors and actresses who were present She gave him concise accounts of their careers, surprising him with her knowledge. She was intensely alive; it was difficult to recognize in her the bored praying girl who had traveled with him from Long Beach on that late September afternoon. In her low-cut evening-dress, with her white arms and dazzling shoulders, he found her twice as alluring. But he wished she would show more interest in him and a little less in the audience. Every time he thought he had secured her attention, she would discover a new face on which to focus her glasses.
The curtain had risen only a few minutes, when he realized why she had brought him. From the wings Tom entered; from that moment she became spellbound. Teddy tried to reason away his jealousy—his feeling that he had been trapped into coming. It was quite natural that she should have wanted to see her friend—there was nothing so disastrous in that. But—— And he couldn’t get over that but. It would have been fair to have warned him.
In the second interval he found that he was expected to eulogize his rival’s acting. This time, cautioned by the error he had made over Fluffy’s portrait, he was more careful in expressing his opinion. She quickly detected the effort in his enthusiasm. “I didn’t like to tell you,” she whispered apologetically; “but I had to come. Ever so long ago, before I knew you’d be here, I promised him.”
“So that’s the confession that’s been worrying you?”
“One of them.” She touched his hand.
It wasn’t until midnight, when they had had supper and were flying uptown, that she told him.
“We’ve had a good first day, Meester Deek, in spite—in spite of everything.”
Mister Dick had been the name of the hero in the play; Meester Deek had been the caressing way in which the Italian woman who loved him had pronounced it. That Desire should call him Meester Deek seemed an omen.
He turned to her gladly. She was in her Nell Gwynn mood and at her tenderest. Through the darkness he could see the convulsive little curl. The beauty-patch seemed a sign put there to mark the acceptable place to kiss her.
“So I’m Meester Deek! You won’t call me Teddy. I knew you’d have to find a name for me.”