“Oh, please don’t say that, Miss Prentiss!” the young man protested, still in that tone which seemed to Felix unnatural and “prissy.” At the foot of the wide stairs he halted, and put a finger to his lips. “I don’t know really whether I ought to show you the set—just yet. It’s not quite—”
“I’m sure it’s perfectly all right,” the girl said firmly, and proceeded up the stairs. To Felix she continued over her shoulder: “It’s a set for our ‘Prince and Pauper’. I’m mad to see what it’s like. Paul ought to do something quite stunning with it.”
“But I’ve only got one scene done, you know,” Paul objected. “And even that’s uncertain, you understand; the idea for the whole thing—” he waved his hands helplessly; Felix noted that they were graceful hands and beautifully manicured—“hasn’t quite come yet!”
He paused again, doubtfully, but the girl ran relentlessly up the stairs. On the top floor she stopped in front of a door. “Now don’t make any excuses, Paul, but just let us in.”
Paul obediently opened the door, snapped on the lights, and they entered a room of which the walls were covered with tattered Persian rugs, the shelves sprinkled with curious bronze figures, and the floor, along one wall, lined with a row of books. In the centre of the room was a drawing-table, littered with scraps of gold and silver paper, coloured crayons, and tiny bottles of coloured inks. In the corner with a wire running down from the electric fixture in the ceiling, was a pot of glue. Felix walked over to the wall, glanced down at the row of books on the floor, and noted a set of the Yellow Book and an odd volume of the Savoy.
Paul had taken up a small model of a stage-set and was looking at it anxiously.
“Oh,” the girl cried, “let me see!”
He put it into her hands, sat down at the drawing-table, jumped up and turned on the current under his pot of glue, and sat down again, intent upon a pasteboard figure which he had taken from the tiny stage.
“Dear me, this is all wrong,” he said in distress, stripping the tinsel from the figure. “How could I?”
“Look,” the girl said to Felix, beckoning him with her head. “This is the palace scene. See—”