“Yes,” indifferently answered the young girl, who was adjusting her hat before the mirror.
“How attentive he is!” cooed Susan, her tones floating in a higher register. “Poor man! Enjoy yourself while you may, my dear,” she went on. “When youth is gone, what is left? Women should sow their wild oats as well as men. I don’t call them wild oats, though, but paradisaical oats. The Elysian fields are strewn with them.”
As she spoke, her glance swept her companion searchingly, and, in that brief scrutiny, Susan observed with inward complacency how pale the other was, and how listless her manner! Their common secret, however, made Susan’s outward demeanor sweetly solicitous and gently sympathetic. Her mind, passing in rapid review over recent events, dwelt not without certain satisfaction upon results. True, every night she was still forced to witness Constance’s success, which of itself was wormwood and gall to Susan, to stand in the wings and listen to the hateful applause; but the conviction that the sweets of popular 366 favor brought not what they were expected to bring, was, in a way, an antidote to Susan’s dissatisfaction.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing and can sometimes be made annoying; in Susan’s case it was a weapon sharpened with honeyed phrase and consolatory bearing, for she was not slow to discover nor to avail herself of the irritating power this knowledge gave her. Constance’s pride and reticence, however, made it difficult for Susan to discern when her shafts went true. Moreover, although harboring no suspicion of Susan’s dissimulation, she instinctively held aloof from her and remained coldly unresponsive. Perhaps in the depths of Susan’s past lurked something indefinable which threw its shadow between them, an inscrutable impediment; and her inability to penetrate the young actress’ reserve, however she might wound her, awakened Susan’s resentment. But she was too world-wise to display her irritation. She even smiled sweetly now, as confidante to confidante, and, turning to her impulsively, said:
“Let me help you on with your cloak, dear?”
Out of the quiet, deserted theater, isolated from external din, to the busy streets, where drays went thundering by, and industry manifested itself in resounding clatter, was a sudden, but not altogether unwelcome, change to Constance. Without waiting for the manager, who paused at the rear entrance to impress his final instructions upon a stolid-looking 367 property-man, she turned quickly into the noisy thoroughfares.
On and on her restlessness led her, conscious of the clangor of vehicles and voices and yet remote from them; past those picturesque suggestions of the one-time Spanish rulers in which the antiquarian could detect evidence of remote Oriental infusion; past the silken seductions of shops, where ladies swarmed and hummed like bees around the luscious hive; past the idlers’ resorts, from whence came the rat-a-tat of clinking billiard balls and the louder rumble of falling ten-pins.
In a window of one of these places, a club with a reputation for exclusiveness, a young man was seated, newspaper in hand, a cup of black coffee on a small table before him, and the end of a cigar smoking on the tray where he had placed it. With a yawn, he had just thrown aside the paper and was reaching for the thick, dark beverage––his hand thin and nervous––when, glancing without, he caught sight of the actress in the crowd. Obeying a sudden impulse, he arose, picking up his hat which lay on a chair beside him.
“Yo’ order am ready in a moment, Mr. Mauville,” said a colored servant, hurrying toward the land baron as the latter was leaving.
“I’ve changed my mind and don’t want it,” replied the other curtly.