At the mention of the new lines the faces of the girls brightened, but instantly they strove to hide the hope and anxiety the announcement had caused them, and in the silence that followed each tried to think how she could get a word with Mr. Lennox. At length one more enterprising than the rest said:
'I must run back. I've forgotten my handkerchief.'
'You needn't mind your handkerchief, you won't see Mr. Lennox to-night,' exclaimed Dolly, who always trampled on other people's illusions as readily as she did on her own. 'The lines aren't for you nor me, nor any of us,' she continued. 'You little silly, can't you guess who they're for? For his girl, of course!'
Murmurs of assent followed this statement, and, her hands on her hips,
Dolly triumphantly faced her auditors.
'It's damned hard, but you can't expect the man to take her out of her linen-drapery for nothing.'
The old stage-door keeper, whose attention had been concentrated on what he was eating out of a jam-pot, now suddenly woke up to the fact that the passage was blocked, and that a group of musicians with boxes in their hands were waiting to get through.
'Now, ladies, I must ask you to move on; there're a lot of people behind you.'
'Yes, get on, girls; we're all up a tree this time, and the moral of it is that we haven't yet learnt how to fall in love with the manager. The paper-collar woman has beaten us at our own game.'
A roar of laughter followed this remark, which was heard by everybody, and pushing the girls before her, Dolly cleared the way.
These girls, whose ambitions in life were first to obtain a line—that is to say, permission to shout, in their red tights, when the low comedian appears on the stage, 'Oh, what a jolly good fellow the Duke is!'—secondly, to be asked out to dinner by somebody they imagine looks like a gentleman, revolted against hearing this paper-collar woman, as they now called her, speak the long-dreamed-of, long-described phrases; and at night they did everything they dared to 'queer' her scene. They crowded round her, mugged, and tried to divert the attention of the house from her.