“I have just left her,” Matravers replied. “She appears to like the play, and has consented to play Bathilde.”
The actor smiled. Was Matravers really so simple, or did he imagine that an actress whose name was as yet unknown would hesitate to play with him at the Pall Mall Theatre. Yet he himself had been hoping that there might be some difficulty,—he had a “Bathilde” of his own who would take a great deal of pacifying. The thing was settled now however.
“I should like,” he said, “to make her acquaintance at once.”
“I have thought of that,” Matravers said. “Will you lunch with me at my rooms on Sunday and meet her? that is, of course, if she is able to come.”
“I shall be delighted,” Fergusson answered. “About two, I suppose?”
Matravers assented, and the two men parted. The actor, with a little shrug of his shoulders and the air of a man who has an unpleasant task before him, turned southwards to interview the lady who certainly had the first claim to play “Bathilde.” He found her at home and anxiously expecting him.
“If you had not come to-day,” she remarked, “I should have sent for you. I want you to contradict that rubbish.”
She threw the theatrical paper across at him, and watched him, whilst he read the paragraph to which she had pointed. He laid the paper down.
“I cannot altogether contradict it,” he said. “There is some truth in what the man writes.”