“May I see Marguerite for a minute?”
“She’s got to change,” said “John” doubtfully, “and she comes on about five minutes after the curtain goes up. But I’ll see.”
He went through a door at the far end of the “cork-room” and soon reappeared with Marguerite close behind him. She was in a yellow and red costume—the skirt not to her knees, the waist barely to the top of her low corset. She put out a small hand white of itself, and smeared with rice-powder. Her hair was natural golden and Stilson thought her as beautiful and as spiritual as she had seemed beyond the footlights. “Perhaps not quite so young,” he said to himself, “possibly twenty.” In fact she was almost thirty. Her voice was sweet and childish, her manner confiding, as became so young-looking a person.
Stilson was unable to speak. He could only look and long. And he felt guilty for looking—she was very slightly clad. She and Penrose talked commonplaces about the opening, Penrose flattering her effectively—Stilson thought his compliments crude and insulting, felt that she would resent them if she really understood them. She soon rose, touched the champagne glass to her lips, nodded and was gone. The curtain was up—they could hear the music and the scuffling of many feet on the stage overhead.
“You don’t want to miss this, Mr. Penrose,” said “John.” “It’s out o’sight.”
They took a second glass of the champagne and left the rest for “John.” When they were a few feet down the passage, Stilson went back to the door of the “cork-room.” The shutter lifted at his knock and he cast his friendliest look into the wicked, good-humoured, bull-dog face. “My name is Stilson,” he said. “You won’t forget me if I should come again alone?”
“I never forget a face,” said “John.” “That’s why I keep my job.”
Stilson’s infatuation increased with each of Marguerite’s appearances. The longer he looked, the stronger was the spell woven over his senses by that innocent face, by those magnetic arms and legs. But he would have knocked down any one who had suggested that it was a sensuous spell.
He devoted his account of the performance for the World to Marguerite, the marvellous young interpreter of the innermost meaning of music.
The copy-reader “toned down” some of the superlatives, but left his picture in the main untouched. And the next day every one in the office was talking about “Stilson’s story of that girl up at the Gold and Glory.” It was the best possible advertisement for the hall and for the girl. Penrose called him on the telephone and laughed at him. “You are a fox,” he said. “Old Barclay—he’s the manager down there, you know—called me up a while ago and asked if I knew who wrote the puff of Feronia in the World. I told him it was you. Follow it up, old man.”