“He will not understand.”
“Oh, yes, he will,” the girl laughed. “Come, you have all the advantages; you are rich, you are clever; you belong to his class. If he elects to stop with me, it will be because he is my man—mine. Are you afraid?”
The woman shivered. She wrapped her fur cloak about her closer and sat down again, and Tommy returned to her proofs. It was press-night, and there was much to be done.
He came a little later, though how long the time may have seemed to the two women one cannot say. They heard his footstep on the stair. The woman rose and went forward, so that when he opened the door she was the first he saw. But he made no sign. Possibly he had been schooling himself for this moment, knowing that sooner or later it must come. The woman held out her hand to him with a smile.
“I have not the honour,” he said.
The smile died from her face. “I do not understand,” she said.
“I have not the honour,” he repeated. “I do not know you.”
The girl was leaning with her back against the desk in a somewhat mannish attitude. He stood between them. It will always remain Life’s chief comic success: the man between two women. The situation has amused the world for so many years. Yet, somehow, he contrived to maintain a certain dignity.
“Maybe,” he continued, “you are confounding me with a Dick Danvers who lived in New York up to a few months ago. I knew him well—a worthless scamp you had done better never to have met.”
“You bear a wonderful resemblance to him,” laughed the woman.