“Yes, that’s it, put it on your mother now, poor woman! who isn’t here to stretch out her hand and stop you from playing a double game with two girls so placed they couldn’t help themselves—just doing kind acts for a sick man.” Suddenly she got to her feet. “I tell you, Jesse Bulrush, that you’re a man—you’re a man—”
But she could keep it up no longer. She burst out laughing, and the false tears of the actress she dashed from her eyes as she added: “That you’re a man after my own heart. But you can’t have it, even if you are after it, and you are welcome to the thirty-seven-year-old seraph in there!” She tossed a hand towards the house.
By this time he was on his feet too, almost bursting. “Well, you wicked little rip—you Ellen Terry at twenty-two, to think you could play it up like that! Why, never on the stage was there such—!”
“It’s the poetry made me do it. It inspired me,” she gurgled. “I felt—why, I felt here”—she pressed her hand to her heart “all the pangs of unrequited love—oh, go away, go back to the house and read that to her! She’s in the sitting-room, and my mother’s away down-town. Now’s your chance, Claude Melnotte.”
She put both hands on his big, panting chest and pushed him backward towards the house. “You’re good enough for anybody, and if I wasn’t so young and daren’t leave mother till I get my wisdom-teeth cut, and till I’m thirty-seven—oh, oh, oh!” She laughed till the tears came into her eyes. “This is as good as—as a play.”
“It’s the best acted play I ever saw, from ‘Ten Nights in a Bar-room’ to ‘Struck Oil,’” rejoined Jesse Bulrush, with a face still half ashamed yet beaming. “But, tell me, you heartless little woman, are the verses worth anything? Do you think she’ll like them?”
Kitty grew suddenly serious, and a curious look he could not read deepened in her eyes. “Nurse ‘ll like them—of course she will,” she said gently. “She’ll like them because they are you. Read them to her as you read them to me, and she’ll only hear your voice, and she’ll think them clever and you a wonderful man, even if you are fifty and weigh a thousand pounds. It doesn’t matter to a woman what a man’s saying or doing, or whether he’s so much cleverer than she is, if she knows that under everything he’s saying, ‘I love you.’ A man isn’t that way, but a woman is. Now go.” Again she pushed him with a small brown hand.
“Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!” he said admiringly.
“Then be a father to me,” she said teasingly.
“I can’t marry both your mother and nurse.”