“Oh but,” said Alvina, “father was a showman even in the shop. He always was. Mother said he was like a showman in a booth.”
Miss Pinnegar was taken aback.
“Well!” she said sharply. “If that’s what you’ve seen in him!”—there was a pause. “And in that case,” she continued tartly, “I think some of the showman has come out in his daughter! or show-woman!—which doesn’t improve it, to my idea.”
“Why is it any worse?” said Alvina. “I enjoy it—and so does father.”
“No,” cried Miss Pinnegar. “There you’re wrong! There you make a mistake. It’s all against his better nature.”
“Really!” said Alvina, in surprise. “What a new idea! But which is father’s better nature?”
“You may not know it,” said Miss Pinnegar coldly, “and if so, I can never tell you. But that doesn’t alter it.” She lapsed into dead silence for a moment. Then suddenly she broke out, vicious and cold: “He’ll go on till he’s killed himself, and then he’ll know.”
The little adverb then came whistling across the space like a bullet. It made Alvina pause. Was her father going to die? She reflected. Well, all men must die.
She forgot the question in others that occupied her. First, could she bear it, when the Endeavour was turned into another cheap and nasty film-shop? The strange figures of the artistes passing under her observation had really entertained her, week by week. Some weeks they had bored her, some weeks she had detested them, but there was always a chance in the coming week. Think of the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras!
She thought too much of the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras. She knew it. And she tried to force her mind to the contemplation of the new state of things, when she banged at the piano to a set of dithering and boring pictures. There would be her father, herself, and Mr. May—or a new operator, a new manager. The new manager!—she thought of him for a moment—and thought of the mechanical factory-faced persons who managed Wright’s and the Woodhouse Empire.