"I mean you don't object to the subject,—or Mr. Ryde?" says Olga, kindly, unaware that Mr. Ryde has come away from the tea-table and is now close behind her. Monica, however, sees him, and smiles courteously.
"Oh, no," she says, as in duty bound.
And then the fourth is found and grasped, and all trouble is at an end.
"So glad I can now take my tea in peace," says Olga, with a sigh of profound relief. "Who would be stage-manager?"
"Ah! you don't do much of this kind of thing in Ireland, I daresay," says Mr. Ryde.
"What kind of thing?" asks Olga, sweetly, who doesn't like him. "Tea-drinking?"
"No—acting—er—and that."
"I'm afraid I'm quite at sea about the 'that,'" says Olga, shaking her blonde head. "Perhaps we do a good deal of it, perhaps we don't. Explain it to me."
("Awful stoopid people!—not a word of truth about their ready wit," says Mr. Ryde to himself at this juncture.)
"Oh, well—er—let us confine ourselves to the acting," he says, feeling somehow at a loss. "It is new to you here, it seems."