“I’ll take them,” volunteered Will. “My road lays by the field.”
“A friend in need is a friend indeed.” Tony thrust the heavy roll effusively into Will’s hands. “Ask for my daughter—she’ll help you to stick ’em up on the bill-boards.”
“Your daughter?” murmured Will. He would have resented his sudden reduction to a bill-poster but for the romantic vision of the Bohemian petticoat.
“I can’t pull the strings on both sides of the stage at once, can I? Not to mention the women’s and boys’ voices, and the piping Gaffers. Lord, she’s got a head on her, has Polly. And pops in and out to play the piano too.”
With pleasant flutterings of the springtide fancy, the young man lightly strode with his roll under his arm to the field where a long chocolate-coloured caravan—apparently the vehicle that had transported the elephant—stood horseless at an aperture in the mammoth mushroom described by Tony Flip. Labourers in shirt-sleeves were carrying in ropes and rough benches. Small boys and large dogs stood around, and there was a litter of straw, cardboard, shivered packing-cases, and dirty paper. Two trucks covered with tarpaulin, and a vast box with a high-pitched roof marked “Duke’s Marionettes,” completed the confusion. Will, peeping in, saw a stage already set, at the border of which a girl on her knees was tacking a row of tin footlight-holders. The rear was already roped off, and the benches seemed to rise like a gallery. Evidently the thing was done in style—crowned heads or no crowned heads. Not without a thrill he walked in, and across the grassy floor, but romance fled when the girl, raising her head, presented a face almost as massive as her father’s, and ravaged by smallpox to boot. Polly had indeed “a head on her,” he thought, though long pendent ear-rings preserved its femininity.
Politely concealing his chill, he murmured “Miss Flippance,” and explained he had been instructed to deliver the bills to her.
She received them and him with an indifference that would have been galling had she been prettier, and was not gratifying even from a massive brain.
“Silly nonsense!” she grumbled, unrolling them. “To open before you’ve done your posting and circularizing. There won’t be a soul!”
“Oh, surely—this weather!” he murmured.
Miss Flippance threw him an annihilating glance. “If dad once gets an idea into his head, you can’t get it out with a forceps.” Will stared at this vigorous young lady, who, with a poster unfurled in her hand, proceeded to yell directions and rebukes at the bench-arranging clodhoppers. It was an insult to his sex, he felt resentfully. No woman, however ugly, had the right to order men about, men who were not even married to her.