CHAPTER IX
DUNHAM TALKS BUSINESS
And presently Perry learned why he had been keeping in shape. Something did turn up. It happened in this wise:
Felicity had been very canny; she'd made each trump card tell. And with Perry Blair waved always in his face, Dunham had grown ugly.
"You know I'm crazy about you," he complained. "Give that four-flusher the gate."
"A million Johns have told me that," Felicity answered. "Talk business."
But Dunham had refused to talk business. He was ugly about it. And then he thought to see a way around. He sent for Perry Blair, and Perry came. That surprised Dunham. He had expected in the end to have to go to Blair. He did not know how Felicity, unwittingly, had helped him.
For Felicity, unable not to enjoy a little the boy's inarticulate devotion, had indulged herself. With artistry that would have called down from Hamilton even hotter sarcasm, she had let Perry glimpse her soul; not the cheap and tawdry thing which unsympathetic persons were likely to think it, but her real one, a little saddened, a little forlorn!
"I wish I could get away from all this," she'd said, with appropriate wistfulness. "I'm dead sick of it—sick of it all. I wish I could go away—somewhere—anywhere where things are clean. Where there are trees and growing grass—"
It was a very good speech. She knew it must be because she had heard a high-priced leading lady utter it in a three-dollar-and-a-half Broadway success.