“Wonderfully.”
“I wish you’d tell me. Of course Desire wrote me; but I don’t know much.”
While she told him, he kept stealing glances at the others. He wondered at what they were laughing; then he came to the conclusion that it wasn’t at what was being said, but at the knowledge each had of the game that was in the playing. He began to take notice of Fluffy. She had pale-gold hair—quantities of it—a drooping mouth and eyes of a child’s clearness. She had a way of employing her eyes as magnets. She would fix them on the person to whom she talked so that presently what she said counted for nothing; questions would begin to rise in the mind as to whether she was lonely, why she should be lonely and how her loneliness might be dispelled. Then her glance would fall away and she would seem to say: “I shall have to bear my burden; you won’t help me.” After that all the impulse of the onlooker was to carry her over rough places in his arms. Her voice sounded as though all her life she had been petted; her face made you feel that, however good people had been, she deserved far more. Why had Desire been so positive that he wouldn’t like her? He did; or rather he would, if she would let him. But he had the feeling that, while she was kind, she was distrustful and had fenced herself off so that he could not get near her. He had an idea that he had met her before; he recognized that grave assured air of being worthy to be loved without the obligation of taking notice of the loving. Then he spotted the resemblance, and had difficulty to refrain from laughing. In her quiet sense of beautiful importance she was like Twinkles.
“It’s wonderful,” she was saying; “I never had such a part. ‘Little girl,’ Simon Freelevy said when he saw me, ‘little girl, you’ll take New York by storm.’ And I shall.” She nodded seriously. “Simon Freelevy ought to know; he’s the cleverest producer in America; I believe he was so pleased with himself that he’d have kissed me if I hadn’t had my make-up on. And then, you see, it’s called October, and we open in October. The idea’s subtle; it may catch on.”
She spoke as though the play was a negligible quantity and any success it might have would be due to her acting. Teddy caught the amused eyes of the playwright opposite. He turned back to Janice Audrey. “What’s the plot?” he asked.
“The plot! I’m the plot. You may smile, but I am.—I am the plot of October—isn’t that so, Horace?”
“Oh, yes, Miss Audrey is the plot,” the playwright said gravely. “I have nothing to do with it, except to draw my royalties.” He picked up the thread of his conversation with Desire.
A puzzled look crept into Fluffy’s clear child’s eyes—a wounding suspicion that she was being mocked. She put it from her as incredible.
“When I say I’m the plot, I mean I gave him the story. I told it to him in a punt at Pangbourne this summer. It’s about a woman called October, who’s come to the October of her beauty, but has spring hidden in her heart. She’d loved a man excessively once, when she was young and generous; and he hadn’t valued her love. After that she determined to wear armor, to keep her dreams locked away in her heart and to leave it to the men to do the loving. She becomes an actress, like me. Almost autobiography! At last, when she realizes that her popularity depends on her beauty and she hears the feet of the younger generation climbing after her—at last he comes, the one wearing a smoke-blue corded velvet, trimmed with gray-squirrel fur at the sleeves and collar. Her hat was the gray breast of a bird and sat at a slant across her forehead. There was a flush of color in her cheeks. Again the beauty-patch had wandered; it was on the left of her chin now. As he watched, he felt the lack of something; then he knew what it was.
“Why, what’s happened to your curl?”