“Come back!”
Jill proceeded toward the staircase. As she went, a husky voice spoke in her ear.
“Go to it, kid! You’re all right!”
The head-carpenter had broken his Trappist vows twice in a single evening, a thing which had not happened to him since the night three years ago, when, sinking wearily onto a seat in a dark corner for a bit of a rest, he found that one of his assistants had placed a pot of red paint there.
§ 4.
To Mr Goble, fermenting and full of strange oaths, entered Johnson Miller. The dance-director was always edgey on first nights, and during the foregoing conversation had been flitting about the stage like a white-haired moth. His deafness had kept him in complete ignorance that there was anything untoward afoot, and he now approached Mr Goble with his watch in his hand.
“Eight twenty-five,” he observed. “Time those girls were on stage.”
Mr Goble, glad of a concrete target for his wrath, cursed him in about two hundred and fifty rich and well-selected words.
“Huh?” said Mr Miller, hand to ear.
Mr Goble repeated the last hundred and eleven words, the pick of the bunch.