“But, my son”—Garden the incredulous, to whom sooner or later all secrets were revealed, knew only too well the weakness of his man—“that ass over there said that you said this little filly could play all the ingénues off the West End stage.”
“Did I?” Mr. Jupp spoke with the innocence of a rather large size in cherubs, whom he so much resembled.
“You did.”
“Well, old bye,” Montagu fondled a pendulous chin, “one says so many damn silly things in the course of a lifetime, doesn’t one?”
Garden was fain to admit that it might be so, but of all the foolishness ever perpetrated Montagu Jupp’s original dictum upon Lady Elfreda’s acting was “the terminus.”
All the same, to the general astonishment, including that of Sir Toby that hardened optimist, by the end of a long and strenuous day the stock of Lady Elfreda was showing a decided tendency to rise. Those who had worked with the leading lady at her worst, and a pretty hopeless worst it had seemed, could not understand the change. They resented the excellence of her memory—she actually knew all her stupid words by heart!—yet beyond everything else they resented the new air of intelligence that had come upon her.
The spirit and the interest she had been able to display in response to the demands of Mr. Montagu Jupp told heavily against her now. The others bitterly recalled her long week of silence, of indifference to her fellow guests, of her strange ignorance of every subject on which their tongues had run. They were now forced to conclude that all this had been a pose. It was a new form of “side.” Moreover it was a form so subtle that it was very difficult to meet. Lady Elfreda’s pretense of not knowing anything about anything was pure affectation in the eyes of those whose aim in life was to know everything about everything and not be ashamed of saying so. And they would not be able to forgive it. It was a subtle way of “scoring them off.”
“Sidey little cat, I hate her,” thus Mrs. Spencer-Jobling in the depths of her heart. “Anyway, on Tuesday, with a bit of luck, I think I ought to be able to kill her big scene in the third act.”
A mad world! As soon as Lady Elfreda began to show signs of leading her comrades out of the slough of despond in which for a whole week they had been engulfed, her unpopularity crystallized into virile personal dislike. Henceforward, among the ladies of the house party at any rate, she was never mentioned by name; she was always referred to as the S. L. C.