He went to Mary, still staring at her uneaten meal, with a compromise. “I think you might sing this season with the Choral Society, Mary,” he said, “attending their practices and appearing in public when they appear.”
“Daddy Pate,” she said, “I didn’t mean to be a nuisance, but I had to make you see it. The Choral Society? That means just in the chorus.”
“Well, for this season, Mary.”
“But the ‘Messiah’? You promised me.”
“Oh, hardly. But we shall see, Mary. We shall see.” And knowing that she had got him, so to speak, with his foot on the butter-side, she kissed him very sweetly and then, to show him what a practical, commonsensical person she really was, she sat down to breakfast. “And I don’t mind,” she said, “if the bacon is cold,” and ate, magnanimously.
CHAPTER IV—MR. CHOWN OF LONDON
THE best that could be said about the Wheatsheaf Hotel at Staithley Bridge was very good indeed; it was that when a certain eminent actor-manager was appearing in Manchester, he put up at the Wheatsheaf in Staithley and motored in and out. It is thirty miles each way, there is a Midland Hotel in Manchester, and actor-managers know all there is to know about personal comfort. That places the Wheatsheaf.
It was Staithley’s sporting hotel, and golf club-houses, not to mention the habit of golfers of motoring to their sport, have dispelled the illusion that sportsmen are a hardy race. The Wheatsheaf had its crowded hour when the visiting teams of professional footballers who came to oppose Staithley Rovers arrived in a charabanc, and attracted customers, who paid reckless prices for drinks in a place where they could get near views of authentic heroes: but for the most part, solid, quiet comfort was the keynote of the Wheatsheaf and commercial travelers knew it.