“What’s it all about? I’ve just run out of secrets, so do tell me. Let’s walk on, not stand in this damp. Let me see your boots—are they stout enough? Stand under this lamplight until I disprove your fib—ah-ha, they are not stout enough. I shall call a cab.”
“Please don’t. I’ll run away and you’ll have to drive Taffy about. I must walk or I cannot sing to-night—I want to walk miles and miles—”
“They’ll miss you and be throwing a scare into Gasoti that you’ve been kidnapped. It’s ‘The Magic Flute,’ too, one of your best ... please, Thurley, just walk along until you’ve told me the worst and then we’ll get a cab—”
“What of yourself?” she asked, suddenly feeling elated and quite fit.
He halfway unbuttoned his coat, showing an expanse of white shirt bosom. “Full dress for a banquet at which I’m to speak. I took a turn along here to get myself in trim ... tell me, what about your fancies?”
Thurley’s eyes were like stars. She caught hold of his arm as if he had been Dan and began to talk. It seemed the most wonderful yet natural thing in the world to tell him everything. The harsh critic, the impersonal man of affairs vanished; he was a good pal walking unselfishly in the rain and under such self-sacrificing conditions that it would be an unusual woman who could not furnish him with a complete line of new secrets!
When she finished, having begun with Mark’s flirtation and her own hint of nerves and ending with this Hortense Quinby and the muddle she was in about the morals of the “songbirds,” Hobart said with a jolly laugh that set her nerves quite right,
“When you get jammed, always remember the most delectable sport in the world is to let fools take you for an even greater fool. As I told you many months ago, be yourself and everything swings into line. Come over to-morrow at ten; there are one or two flaws in your ‘Rigoletto’ song, ‘Caro Nome’—didn’t know I kept such close track of some one, did you?... Hi, cabby—yes, no, just the lady and the terrier, the Terror will proceed alone, but twice as happy because he paused before a certain dark outline ... good-by, to-morrow at ten and, remember, stouter boots the next time it rains.”
With a feeling of disappointment that he did not join her, yet exhilarated and impatient for the morning, Thurley leaned back in the cab and hugged the aggrieved Taffy.
She sang so well that night the critics bemoaned the lack of new adjectives with which to do her credit, her dressing-room was crowded with visitors, social leaders who had left their boxes to besiege her with invitations. Miss Clergy sat supreme in a corner of the dressing-room, engrossed in old-style crewel work which she had learned as a girl.