Here, soon a year ago, while weaving herself a garland (she was playing at being Europa with the Saunders’ Fifeshire bull; flourishing flowers at it; tempting it with waving poppies; defying it to bear her away from the surrounding stagnance), the realization of her dramatic gift first discovered itself.
And then, her thoughts tripped on, he came: the Rev. George—“just as I was wondering to whom to apply”—and drew all Applethorp to S. Ann-on-the-Hill by the persuasive magnetism of his voice; largely due—so he said—to “scientific production.” To the Bromley Breath! He never could adequately thank Elizabeth, Mrs. Albert Bromley, for all she had done. No; because words failed.... Her Institute, for him, would be always “top-o’-the-tree,” and when asked, by her, “What tree?” he had answered with a cryptic look: “She trains them for the stage.”
Dear heart! How much he seemed to love it. He had known by their green-room names all the leading stars, and could tell on occasion, little anecdotes of each.
It was he who narrated how Mrs. Mary (as she was then), on the first night of Gulnara, Queen of the Lattermonians, got caught in the passenger-lift on the way from her dressing-room to the stage and was obliged to allow her understudy to replace her, which with the utmost éclat she did, while Mrs. Mary, who could overhear the salvos from her prison, was driven quite distraught at a triumph that, but for the irony of things, would most certainly have been hers.
Miss Sinquier sighed.
“Which reminds me,” she murmured, fixing her eyes upon the storied ceiling, “that I’ve no one at all, should anything happen to me.”
She lay back and considered the inchoate imagery painted in gouache above her.
Hydropic loves with arms outstretched in invitation, ladies in hectic hats and billowing silks, courtiers, lap-dogs, peacocks, etc., all intermingled in the pleasantest way.
As she gazed a great peace fell upon her. Her eyelids closed.