"I'll give you a hold over him," she said. "I'll stand by you. Wasn't it all my doing? Who's that knocking?—You can't come in."
Good-nature was back as she turned from the interruption. She smiled indulgently, as one who was hoarding a gift.
"I wouldn't lift a finger for him," she said. "But I'm silly over you. I'll tell you. And you can go back to him and make your bargain."
The girl shut her lips hard. She must listen;—for Barnaby's sake she must listen. The shamed colour ebbed in her cheek.
"I'm not mad, or bad,—at least not to speak of," said Adelaide, "but I'm careless.... Oh, I'll give you your Englishman, child; you needn't look so stricken! I once had a kind of a romance myself. When I was a young thing like you I married myself to a shabby little poet. But I grew tired of him muttering verses and dreaming things upside down; and we had a divorce, and I ran and left him and went on the stage. And all the while that little man kept on writing; and when he'd used up all his poetry, and all the dead kings and queens, he woke up and wrote a play."
A queer pride, not unmixed with tenderness, came into her voice at that.
"What do you think?" she said. "Nothing would move him but that they should find me out and give me the star part. 'I have had her in my mind all these years,' he said, 'and it is she. No one but she shall play it.'—All these years that I had forgotten him, he was building me a ladder—."
She laughed abruptly, banishing sentiment.
"I've done all the talking," she said, "and I must, while you sit there dumb with your big eyes asking me if it's to be the dagger or the bowl. D'you remember when I was Queen Eleanor, and you were the Rosamond, and the boys nearly shouted the roof down, begging you not to drink? Ah, those times, they were funny. I've shot up since, like a rocket into the sky."
Time was running out. Somewhere in the distance there was a blare of music. She had finished making up, and she must let in her dresser.