"I'll wait here until Mr. Lambert leaves the theater," she said at last. "And I think I can promise you that you'll lose your place when he hears that you refused to take up my card."
Her indignation and her threat were too real to be ignored. They influenced the man's manner.
"Oh, well, chuck it over," he said grudgingly.
She handed it to him. In addition to her name it bore the words "Mrs. Hugh Lambert's Company." She had already penciled on it a line meant for Lambert's own eye. The man went off grumbling. When he returned his arrogance had entirely disappeared.
"The governor will see you," he said. "Up the stairs and the first door on the right." Then he added insinuatingly: "Sorry to keep you waiting, miss; but I get it that hot if I let anybody pass who's wanting an engagement."
She was indifferent to his regrets. All she wanted was to see Lambert and take him back with her. She passed in, hurried up the stairs, where at the top his dressing-room door stood open.
Lambert was playing in a costume piece, a mid-Georgian comedy that owed a great deal of its inspiration to Sheridan. In it he appeared as a beau of that elegant period, and as Alexandra on entering saw him she could but admit that he looked the part. Dressed in gorgeous brocade through which a dainty sword-hilt protruded, immaculately bewigged, lace-ruffled and overpoweringly scented, as she discovered on nearing him, he gave her the impression of extreme elegance, tempered by foppishness and effeminacy. He was sitting before the mirror on his dressing-table, leaning toward it, adding a deeper pencil mark to his eyebrows. When he had done that to his satisfaction he picked up a stick of carmine and deliberately touched up the curve of his lips before turning round to face his visitor. Alexandra had always felt an instinctive dislike of make-up on a man's face, though she recognized it as essential to the stage. But Lambert's attitude before the mirror was so affected, so vain that he instantly inspired her with contempt.
"You come from my wife?" he asked, and she thought she detected a note of dismay in his fine-toned voice. "Did she send you?"
"No," she answered. "But I want you to come down to her at once. She is very ill. I motored up so as not to lose a minute."
He gave a slightly startled movement at her news. It was as though he shrank from hearing it.