‘She’s just breakfasting,’ was the reply.
Crossing the lawn, Craik found himself before a pair of French windows reaching to the ground; they stood wide open, revealing the interior of a small sitting-room or breakfast parlour, gorgeously if not tastily furnished—a sort of green and gold cage, in which was sitting, sipping her coffee and yawning over a penny theatrical paper, a pretty lady of uncertain age. Her little figure was wrapt in a loose silk morning gown, on her tiny feet were Turkish slippers, in her lap was one pug dog, while another slept at her feet. Her eyes were very large, innocent, and blue, her natural dark hair was bleached to a lovely gold by the art of the coiffeur, and her cheeks had about as much colour as those of a stucco bust.
This was Miss Dottie Destrange, of the ‘Frivolity’ Theatre, a lady famous for her falsetto voice and her dances.
On seeing Craik she merely nodded, but did not attempt to rise.
‘Good morning, Georgie!’ she said—for she loved the diminutive, and was fond of using that form of address to her particular friends. ‘Why didn’t you come yesterday? I waited for you all day—no, not exactly all day, though—but except a couple of hours in the afternoon, when I went to church.’
Craik entered the room and threw himself into a chair.
‘Went to church?’ he echoed with an ugly laugh. 41 didn’t know you ever patronised that kind of entertainment.’
‘I don’t as a rule, but Carrie Carruthers called for me in her brougham, and took me off to hear the new preacher down in Regent’s Park. Aram was there, and no end of theatrical people, besides all sorts of swells; and, what do you think, in one of the painted glass windows there was a figure of Shakespeare, just like the one on our drop curtain! I think it’s blasphemous, Georgie. I wonder the roof didn’t fall in!’
The fair doves of the theatre, we may remark in parenthesis, have seldom much respect for the temple in which they themselves flutter; they cannot shake from their minds the idea that it is a heathen structure, and that they themselves are, at the best, but pretty pagans.
Hence they are often disposed to receive in quite a humble spirit the ministrations of their mortal enemies, the officers of the Protestant Church.