“Neither my mother nor my father approved of the theatre; my sister and I have never gone,” she added simply. “We were brought up differently, I suppose.”
“You ain’t missed such an awful lot,” he returned, by way of consolation. “I’ve seen some shows where you got your money’s worth; then, again, I’ve seen ’em that wa’n’t worth twenty-five cents—your pa and ma didn’t have nothin’ agin the circus, did they?”
Miss Ann looked at him, with pinched lips and a hesitant smile. “Perhaps we’d better not discuss it,” said she. “I’m afraid our views are so different, you see. To be frank with you, Mr. Ford, the people of the stage have never attracted me—when you consider their lives, their—their——”
“Don’t you tell Emma,” he intervened, paused, and added confidentially: “But I knew an actress once—finest little woman you ever see, Miss Moulton.”
The needles in her frail, active hands flew nervously.
“Wished I could remember her name—hold on, I got it. Nell Little. ‘Little Nell,’ I used to call her. Come up with a show from Troy and took sick at the Eagle House. Had a small dog with her, I remember—one er them shiverin’, tinklin’, black-and-tans. Nell thought an awful lot of that little cuss. Seems he’d saved her life once in a smash-up on the Delaware and Lackawanna; led them that was searchin’ for her into a burnin’ sleeper. Well, when she took sick at the Eagle House, and the rest of ’em had to leave her—no, hold on, I’m gettin’ ahead of my story.”
The trembling needles dropped a stitch.
“It was Ed Stimson that come to me—that’s it. Ed bought the Eagle House from old Bill Williams’s widder, and Ed and me was pretty close pardners in them days. ‘Ebner,’ says he, ‘Doc Rand claims number nine’s got the pneumonia. She’s been out of her head since daylight. She’s been askin’ for you. Guess you’re elected, Eb.’”
He rambled on, unconscious that every word he uttered was far from welcome to his listener, who sat before him helpless, dazed, and indignant, unable to stem the tide of his worldly narrative. He enlightened her to the fact that he and Little Nell had had supper together only two days before in an oyster-parlor of a friend of his. He insisted that she had taken a shine to him from the first, and that now that she was ill and penniless in the Eagle House, the only decent thing he could do was to pay the doctor and her board bill, dilating on the detail that he was human and incapable of seeing any woman in distress, without coming to her aid like a gentleman, and ended this remarkable résumé by flinging himself back on the sofa with a satisfied smile, stretching his lean jaws in a yawn, as if the incident was only one of many in his wide experience.
“Warm, ain’t it—for March?” he declared, breaking the awkward silence that ensued.