She turned to him and smiled slightly, rather sadly, indeed.
"Mr. Flood," she said, "you and I were both born in the same country but perhaps you have been over the frontier for a long time."
"And perhaps," he answered, and while he did so his voice sounded in his own ears strange and unfamiliar, "and perhaps even a theatrical manager may some day ask for his passport to return."
They drew up at the stage door of the Park Lane Theatre.
Mary did not go back to Mr. Flood's room. She went straight on to the stage. The curtain was up. The house was swathed in brown holland, and only a faint light came down from the glass dome in the roof, showing the whole place melancholy and bizarre. The stage itself was a great expanse of dirty boards, stretching right away to a brick wall at the back, in which was a huge slit, with two dingily-painted doors covering it, by which scenery was brought into the scene-dock a little behind.
Two or three chairs were set down by the unlighted footlights, and there was a tiny table by one of them. The limits of the scene which would be set one day were marked off by chalk lines upon the boards. Two or three nondescript men in soft felt hats wandered about in the wings, and on the prompt side, up a ladder and standing on the platform above where is the switchboard which controls the stage lights, the electrician—in a dirty white linen coat—was twisting wires from one plug to another, and noisily whistling the last popular song.
It was a scene of drab materialism, and the two or three little groups of people who stood here and there neither added to it nor gave it any animation.
As Mary went "on" the actors and actresses who were waiting there looked at her with curious eyes. One or two she knew—they were often at the Actors' Association. Who her colleagues as principals were she had not been told, and as yet had no idea, save only of course that she was to act with Aubrey Flood himself.
She saw, however, with a little thrill of pleasure that Dorothy French was there. She herself had obtained a small part for her little friend from Fabian Rose. Dolly came hurrying up to her, the girl's high-heeled shoes echoing strangely upon the boards and sending out a muffled drum-like note into the dim, shrouded auditorium beyond.