"Ah then it's the theatre that believes in you," said Mr. Nash.
"It would be ungrateful if it didn't after all I've done for it!" Sherringham gaily opined.
Lady Agnes had withdrawn herself from between him and her other guest and, to signify that she at least had finished eating, had gone to sit by her son, whom she held, with some importunity, in conversation. But hearing the theatre talked of she threw across an impersonal challenge to the paradoxical young man. "Pray should you think it better for a gentleman to be an actor?"
"Better than being a politician? Ah, comedian for comedian, isn't the actor more honest?"
Lady Agnes turned to her son and brought forth with spirit: "Think of your great father, Nicholas!"
"He was an honest man," said Nicholas. "That's perhaps why he couldn't stand it."
Peter Sherringham judged the colloquy to have taken an uncomfortable twist, though not wholly, as it seemed to him, by the act of Nick's queer comrade. To draw it back to safer ground he said to this personage: "May I ask if the ladies you just spoke of are English—Mrs. and Miss Rooth: isn't that the rather odd name?"
"The very same. Only the daughter, according to her kind, desires to be known by some nom de guerre before she has even been able to enlist."
"And what does she call herself?" Bridget Dormer asked.
"Maud Vavasour, or Edith Temple, or Gladys Vane—some rubbish of that sort."