"I'll come, Fanny," she said; "it really amounts to turning my back on a battle; still I will come."
CHAPTER XVIII
| "To fill the hour—that is happiness: to fill The hour and leave no crevice for repentance." |
Anon.
"Daddy Brown, this is the girl I spoke to you about; will she do?"
That had been Joan's introduction to the manager of the Brown travelling company. He was a large man, with his neck set in such rolls of fat that quick movement was an impossibility. His eyes, small and surrounded by a multitude of wrinkles, were bloodshot, but for all that excessively keen. Joan felt as they swept over her that she was being appraised, classed, and put aside under her correct value in the man's brain. His hair, which in youth must have grown thick and curly, had fallen off almost entirely from the top of his head, leaving a small island sprouting alone in the midst of the baldness. This was known among the company as "The Danger Mark," for when the skin round it flushed red a fearful storm was brewing for somebody.
He sat in front of a table littered with papers, in a small, rather dirty office, the windows of which opened on to Bedford Street. With the window open, as he kept it, the noise of the Strand traffic was plainly audible.
He eyed Joan slowly and methodically; then his glance turned back to Fanny. "What can she do?" he asked heavily.
"Oh, everything," Fanny answered with a little gasp; "and she can share my dressing-room and all that."