For a moment or two Mary could not speak. "But such a thing never happened before," she answered at length in a faltering voice. "It is——"
He cut her short. "My experience of the stage is at least twenty times more profound than yours," he said, "and I have known the thing happen six times within my own experience. Who found Dolores Rainforth? I did. Who found Beatrice Whittingham?—little wretch, she's deserted art and is making a squalid fortune in drawing-room comedy—I did! I could give you many more names. However, that's neither here nor there. I want you for a certain purpose. I know that if I searched the provinces all over I should not find any one who so exactly fits the leading part—my own conception of it!—in my new play as you do. Therefore you are coming to me. And the amusing part of it is that I have actually stormed the citadel of rank and fashion itself. I have gained a stronghold in the hostile country of the capitalists—in short, I and my friends have secured a lease of the Park Lane Theatre!"
Mary leant back in her chair. Her face had suddenly grown white. She was overwhelmed by all this. And, though she forgot this, her lunch had consisted of a cheap and not very succulent luxury known as a "Vienna steak," a not very nutritious mass of compressed mince-meat, but cheap, very cheap. It was now seven o'clock.
There were those who said that James Fabian Rose was a dreamer. People who knew him intimately were aware that if he was an idealist, he was also practical in the ordinary affairs of life.
"Now, I sha'n't tell you a word more," he said. "They're all waiting for you, and I promised to bring you for dinner. My wife was most insistent about it, and, besides, there are half a dozen people anxious to meet you. In absolute contradiction to all true socialistic principles I've been paying rent for a cab which has been standing outside your front door for ever so long. Put on your hat and come at once."
Mary sat up. "But I can't come like this," she said helplessly, "to dinner!"
Mr. Rose made a gesture of impatience. "The old stupid heresy of Carlyle," he said, "complicated by the fact that if a woman looks nice in one sort of costume she can't realise that she looks nice on whatever occasion she wears it. You must grow superior to such nonsense if we are to enlist you among us! But, come, you'll soon understand, and, besides, I know you are not really the ordinary fluffy little duffer one meets in the stage world."
She fell in with his humour and quickly pinned on her hat. She knew that she was on the threshold of stimulating experiences, that her chance had come, no matter how strange and fantastic the herald of its advent.
As Rose had said, a hansom was waiting. They got into it and trotted slowly away into the fog towards the great man's house at Westminster.
They arrived at last, though it was a somewhat perilous journey. More than once the driver descended from his seat, took one of the lamps from its bracket, and led his horse through this or that misty welter of traffic. Parliament Street was a broad hurry of confusion, but when they had passed the Abbey on the right and turned into the small network of quiet streets behind the Norman tomb of ancient kings, the house of the Socialist in Great College Street—that quiet and memorable backwater of London—was easily found.