“Why,” I answered, “there was some talk of my doing somebody for the Hour.”
Fox put my manuscript under his empty tumbler.
“Yes,” he said, sharply. “He will do, I think. H’m, yes. Why, yes.”
“You’re a friend of Mr. Callan’s, aren’t you?” Mrs. Hartly asked, “What a dear, nice man he is! You should see him at rehearsals. You know I’m doing his ‘Boldero’; he’s given me a perfectly lovely part—perfectly lovely. And the trouble he takes. He tries every chair on the stage.”
“H’m; yes,” Fox interjected, “he likes to have his own way.”
“We all like that,” the great actress said. She was quoting from her first great part. I thought—but, perhaps, I was mistaken—that all her utterances were quotations from her first great part. Her husband looked at his watch.
“Are you coming to this confounded flower show?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, turning her mysterious eyes upon him, “I’ll go and get ready.”
She disappeared through an inner door. I expected to hear the pistol-shot and the heavy fall from the next room. I forgot that it was not the end of the fifth act.
Fox put my manuscript into his breast pocket.