“Why, of course she didn’t, you jealous old Granny. And if I were a woman of genius like you are, and she was, I shouldn’t be getting it either and signing contracts. Don’t you agree, Philip?”
And Miss Mary fixed the young man with her glorious gray eye, and said to him quite distinctly by the Marconi system: “Say Yes, in your heartiest voice, like a dear boy.”
So of course, the young fellow had to say Yes, when he meant No.
It is unkind to make comparisons, but tea and cake in Bedford Gardens, thought Mr. Philip, is a far more interesting function than a four-course luncheon farther west. And yet the young man had by no means a great appetite just now. It was the crisis of his fate. Had Mary told Grandmamma? And what would Grandmamma say, if told she had been? For men and gods these were all-important questions.
Certainly, the old thing in the real lace that had been worn by Siddons was very grande dame indeed. Diction clear cut, lively and forcible; not a single English actor worthy of the name in the present generation, and she hadn’t seen the foreign ones; in fact, the race had perished with Mr. Macready, who had taken her to Gadshill to drink tea with Mr. Dickens.
“But, what about Sir Henry Irving, Granny?” said Mary, covertly twitching her charming left eyelid at the heir.
“Pretty well, for an amateur, my dear, but better fitted to play the hind-leg of a dragon than the Prince of Denmark.”
“Oh, how terribly severe!” said Mary, so demurely that the Morning Coat had an overpowering desire to clasp her to its braided bosom.
“Good at melodrama no doubt, my dear,” said Grandmamma, “in the Surrey theaters; but to my mind wholly unfitted to carry on the great tradition of Edward Bean and John Kendall.”
It is by no means clear that the Braided Morning Coat was able to enjoy Grandmamma’s caustic criticism of the present hopelessly inferior histrionic age as much as it might have done, because there was that sinking sensation somewhere about the third button which somehow seemed to suggest that it was going to be its turn presently. And although a very ordinary sort of coat, which put forth no special claim to be endowed with the gift of prophecy, in this it was not a great way off the mark.