Noting his observations one night, a pretty girl in the wings asked jocularly if "she had promised to wait outside for him."
"No, Kitty, my darling, she hasn't; she won't have anything to do with me!" he answered, and would have liked to stop and flirt with her. His brain was hot at the instant, and one woman or another just then——
If Mary had been waiting, he could have talked to her as sentimentally as before; and have felt as much sentiment, too. All compunction for his lapses he could assuage by a general condemnation of masculine nature.
The pretty girl had no part in the play. She was the daughter of a good-looking woman who was engaged in the dual capacity of "chamber-maid" and wardrobe-mistress; but although she had only just left boarding-school, it was a foregone conclusion that, like her mother, she would be connected with the lower branches of the profession before long. Already she had acquired very perfectly, in private, the burlesque lady's tone of address, and was familiar with the interior of provincial bars, where her mother took a "tonic" after the performance.
Carew ran across them both, among a group of the male members of the company, in the back-parlour of a public-house an hour later. Kitty, innocent enough as yet to find "darling" a novelty, welcomed him with a flash of her eyes; but he made no response, and, gulping his whisky, sat glum. The others commented on his abstraction. He replied morosely, and called for "the same again." It was not unusual for him to drink to excess now—he was accustomed to excuse the weakness by compassionating himself upon his dreary life—and to-night he lay back on the settee sipping whisky till he grew garrulous.
They remained at the table long after the closing hour, the landlady, who was a friend of Kitty's mamma, enjoining them to quietude. She was not averse from joining the party herself when the lights in the window had been extinguished nor did Kitty decline to take a glass of wine when Carew at last pressed her to be sociable.
"Because you're growing up," he said with a foolish laugh—"'getting a big girl now'!"
She swept him a mock obeisance in the centre of the floor, shaking back the hair that was still worn loose about her shoulders.
"Sherry," she said, "if mother says her popsy may? Because I'm 'getting a big girl now,' mother!"
The bar was in darkness, and this necessitated investigation with a box of matches. When the bottle was produced, it proved to be empty; the girl's pantomime of despair was received with loud guffaws. Everybody had drunk more than was advisable, and the proprietress again attempted to restrain the hilarity by feeble allusions to her licence.