“Why are you here?” he demanded, as though she owed him an explanation.
“Haven’t you seen? We’re playing here to-night This one-night business is getting my goat.”
David Joslin stared at her. “I know—I saw it all. Sometimes a man’s hard to manage.” His voice was savage.
“That’s the truth!” said Polly Pendleton. “I’m not big enough to throw you out, and I don’t like to call the porter, but I’ve got to have my supper before long. Have you had yours?”
“Yes. It cost me six bits. That’s the mostest I ever spent for one meal in all my life.”
“Is that so?” said Polly wistfully. “I wish I could get mine down to that scale! Sometimes it’s—well, rather more.”
“It left me thirty-five cents,” said David Joslin, smiling bitterly.
“Huh! That’s just about what you had the last time you saw me. Is it the same thirty-five cents you had then?”
Again she laughed, and then rippled out in her irrepressible generosity, her sympathy. “Poor chap!” said she. “Haven’t you got ahead any farther than that in two years?” Polly Pendleton could not see any suffering unmoved. She herself had lived.
“It’s odd,” she said, something of his old story coming back to her. “You must be thirty-five or six, aren’t you?—or maybe forty?”