“Very indeed, but he’s several years younger than she. Wait till she turns her head.”
She turned it very soon—she apparently had been speaking to the ouvreuse, at the door of the box—and presented her face to the public; a fair harmonious face, with smiling eyes, smiling lips, a low brow ornamented with delicate rings of black hair and ears marked by the sparkle of diamonds sufficiently large to be seen across the Théâtre Français. Littlemore looked at her, then started and held out his hand. “The glass, please!”
“Do you know her?” his friend asked as he directed the little instrument.
He made no answer; he only looked in silence; then he gave the glass back. “No, she’s not respectable.” And he dropped again into his seat. As Waterville remained standing he added: “Please sit down; I think she saw me.”
“Don’t you want her to see you?” pursued the interrogator, promptly complying.
Littlemore hesitated. “I don’t want to spoil her game.” By this time the entr’acte was at an end and the curtain going up.
It had been Waterville’s idea that they should go to the theatre. Littlemore, who was always for not going anywhere, had recommended that, the evening being lovely, they should simply sit and smoke at the door of the Grand Café in comparatively pensive isolation. Nevertheless Waterville enjoyed the second act even less than he had done the first, which he thought heavy. He began to wonder whether his companion would wish to stay to the end; a useless line of speculation, for now that he had got to the theatre Littlemore’s aversion to change would certainly keep him from moving. Waterville also wondered what he knew about the lady in the box. Once or twice he glanced at his friend, and then was sure the latter wasn’t following the play. He was thinking of something else; he was thinking of that woman. When the curtain fell again he sat in his place, making way for his neighbours, as usual, to edge past him, grinding his knees—his legs were long—with their own protuberances. When the two men were alone in the stalls he spoke. “I think I should like to see her again, after all.” He spoke in fact as if Waterville might have known all about her. Waterville was conscious of not doing so, but as there was evidently a good deal to know he recognised he should lose nothing by exerting some art. So for the moment he asked no question; he only said: “Well, here’s the glass.”
Littlemore gave him a glance of good-natured compassion. “I don’t mean I want to keep letting that off at her. I mean I should rather like to see her as I used to.”
“And how did you use to?” asked Waterville with no art now.
“On the back piazza at San Pablo.” And as his comrade, in receipt of this information, only stared he went on: “Come out where we can breathe and I’ll tell you more.”