“Oh, but you can. It’s so easy to distinguish polite applause from the real thing. No doubt many of the people down here have friends in the company or other reasons for seeming to enjoy the play, but look how the circle and the gallery were enjoying it! You can’t tell me that that was not genuine. They love it. How hard,” she proceeded commiseratingly, “you must have worked, poor boy, during the tour on the road to improve the piece so much! I never liked to say so before, but even you must agree with me now that that original version of yours, which was done down at Newport, was the most terrible nonsense! And how hard the company must have worked, too! Otie,” cried Mrs Peagrim, aglow with the magic of a brilliant idea, “I will tell you what you must really do. You must give a supper and dance to the whole company on the stage tomorrow night after the performance.”
“What!” cried Otis Pilkington, startled out of his lethargy by this appalling suggestion. Was he, the man who, after planking down thirty-two thousand eight hundred and fifty-nine dollars, sixty-eight cents for “props” and “frames” and “rehl,” had sold out for a paltry ten thousand, to be still further victimized?
“They do deserve it, don’t they, after working so hard?”
“It’s impossible,” said Otis Pilkington vehemently. “Out of the question.”
“But, Otie darling, I was talking to Mr Mason, when he came down to Newport to see the piece last summer, and he told me that the management nearly always gives a supper to the company, especially if they have had a lot of extra rehearsing to do.”
“Well, let Goble give them a supper if he wants to.”
“But you know that Mr Goble, though he has his name on the programme as the manager, has really nothing to do with it. You own the piece, don’t you?”
For a moment Mr Pilkington felt an impulse to reveal all, but refrained. He knew his Aunt Olive too well. If she found out that he had parted at a heavy loss with this valuable property, her whole attitude towards him would change,—or, rather, it would revert to her normal attitude, which was not unlike that of a severe nurse to a weak-minded child. Even in his agony there had been a certain faint consolation, due to the entirely unwonted note of respect in the voice with which she had addressed him since the fall of the curtain. He shrank from forfeiting this respect, unentitled though he was to it.
“Yes,” he said in his precise voice. “That, of course, is so.”
“Well, then!” said Mrs Peagrim.