Harold laughed. He was beginning to feel some remorse at having previously looked on Archie Brown as a good-natured fool. He now felt that, in spite of Mrs. Mowbray, he would not wreck his life.
CHAPTER XXXII.—ON SHAKESPEARE AND SUPPER.
CARRIAGES by the score were waiting at the fine Corinthian entrance to the Legitimate, when Harold and Archie reached the theatre in their hansom. The façade of the Legitimate Theatre is so severely Corinthian that foreign visitors invariably ask what church it is.
It was probably the classical columns supporting the pediment of the entrance that caused Archie to abate his frivolous conversation with his friend in the hansom—Archie had been expressing the opinion that it was exhilarating—only exhilarating was not the word he used—to swear at a man who had once been a clergyman and who still wore the dress of a cleric. “A chap feels that his turn has come,” he had said. “No matter how wrong they are you can’t swear at them and tell them to come down out of that, when they’re in their own pulpits—they’d have you up for brawling. That’s why I like to take it out of old Playdell. He tells me, however, that there’s no dean in the Church that gathers in the decimals as he does in my shop. But, bless you! he saves me his screw three times over.”
But now that the classical front of the Legitimate came in view, Archie became solemn.
He possibly appreciated the feelings of a conscientious clergyman when about to enter his Church.
Shakespeare was a great responsibility.
So was Mrs. Mowbray.