'Then you never were—Yes, yes, I understand. A little friendship flavoured with love. Yes, yes. Wears better, perhaps, than the genuine article. What do you think, Leslie?'
'Not bad,' said the prima donna, 'for people with poor appetites. A kind of diet suitable for Lent, I should think.'
'Ah! a title for a short story, or better still for an operetta. What do you think, Montgomery? Shall I do you a book entitled Lovers in Lent, or A Lover's Lent? and Leslie will—'
'No, I won't. None of your forty days for me.'
'I can't understand how you people can go on talking nonsense with a scene so terrible passing under your eyes,' cried the musician, as he pointed to Kate, who was calling after Dick as she staggered in pursuit of him up the stairs towards the stage-door.
'Well, what do you want me to do?'
'She'll disgrace him in the street.'
'I can't help that. I never interfere in a love affair; and this is evidently the great passion of a life.'
Montgomery cast an indignant glance at the novelist and rushed after his friends; but when he arrived at the stage-door he saw the uselessness of his interference.
It was in the narrow street; the heat sweltered between the old houses that leaned and lolled upon the huge black traversing beams like aged women on crutches; and Kate raved against Dick in language that was fearful to hear amid the stage carpenters, the chorus-girls, the idlers that a theatre collects standing with one foot in the gutter, where vegetable refuse of all kinds rotted. Her beautiful black hair was now hanging over her shoulders like a mane; someone had trodden on her dress and nearly torn it from her waist, and, in avid curiosity, women with dyed hair peeped out of a suspicious-looking tobacco shop. Over the way, stuck under an overhanging window, was an orange-stall; the proprietress stood watching, whilst a crowd of vermin-like children ran forward, delighted at the prospect of seeing a woman beaten. Close by, in shirt-sleeves, the pot-boy flung open the public-house door, partly for the purpose of attracting custom, half with the intention of letting a little air into the bar-room.