"They're spendin' lashings of money on them. Won't make a farthing profit, I don't suppose; but the show should be all right. They're getting a 'pro.' down to stage-manage 'em."
"My word, they are going it! Hallo, Joey!"
Miss Gaymer's entrance brought theatrical conversation up to fever heat; and for the rest of the meal, and indeed for the next few days, Hughie lived and breathed in a world composed of rickety scenery, refractory pulleys, and hot size, inhabited by people who were always talking, usually cross, and most intermittent in their feeding-times.
One afternoon Joan took him down to the Hall, ostensibly as a companion, in reality to shift some large flats of scenery, too wide for feminine arms to span.
Captain Leroy had already offered himself in that capacity, but his services had been brutally declined, on the ground that the scenery was not concave.
"The programmes are being printed to-day. We are going to have the tableaux in the first half," Joan rattled on, as they walked through the plantations. "Well-known pictures, you know. Some of them are perfectly lovely. I am in three," she added, rather naïvely.
Hughie asked for details.
"Well, the first one is to be The Mirror of Venus—a lot of girls looking into a pool."
"Are you in that?"
"Not much! That is for all the riff-raff who have crowded in without being invited—the Mellishes, and the Crumfords, and the Joblings. (You know the lot!) There's another tableau for their men: such horrors, my dear! But that disposes of them for Part One: they don't have to appear again until the waxworks. Then there's a perfectly sweet one—The Gambler's Wife."