He did not think of it, precisely, as filching, because his conscience was quite clear that he, being Chown, could do immensely more for her than Pate. Pate would be thinking of the salary of a musical comedy star. Pate would do her positive damage by over-training her up to some impossible standard ridiculously above the big public’s head; and the big public was the only public that counted. Mr. Chown saw himself, in all sincerity, as the girl’s benefactor, if not as her savior.
A word of hers came back to him as a menace to his hopes. “Did I understand you to say that Mr. Pate keeps you?”
Mary Ellen nodded, and he felt he had struck a snag.
“You are a relative of his?”
“I’m not then. If you want to know, he found me singing in the streets.”
“And was this long ago?”
“Getting on for two years.”
Mr. Chown had the grace to feel a twinge: she was, beyond a doubt, Pate’s property. But he recovered balance, telling himself very firmly that Pate would mismanage the property; that life was a battlefield and that “Vae Victis” was its motto; that one must live and that if Pate had taken reasonable precautions, he would not have exposed the girl to the marauding Mr. Chown. And, anyhow, Pate was a provincial.
He asked her age, and “Twenty-one,” she said brazenly, aware of the trammels of minority. He guessed her eighteen at most, but she wasn’t impossibly twenty-one and he had his reasons for believing her.
“You couldn’t be a better age,” he said. “I have some doubt as to what Mr. Pate will say to my proposal of the stage for you.”