"Oh," protested Alicia, "I wasn't thinking about myself," and at the same moment the door opened and Hilda said, "Ah, Mr. Lindsay!"
There was a hint of the unexpected in Duff's response to Miss Howe's greeting, and a suggestion in the way he sat down that this made a difference, and that it would be necessary to find other things to say. He found them with facility, while Hilda decided that she would finish her tea before she went. Alicia, busy with the urn, seemed satisfied to abandon them to each other, to take a decorative place in the conversation, interrupting it with brief inquiries about cream and sugar. Alicia waited; it was her way; she sank almost palpably into the tapestries until some reviving circumstance should bring her out again, a process which was quite compatible with her little laughs and comments. She waited, offering repose, and unconscious even of that. You know Hilda Howe as a creature of bold reflections. Looking at Alicia Livingstone behind the tea-pot, the conviction visited her that a sex three-quarters of this fibre explained the monastic clergy.
"It is reported that you have performed the wonderful, the impossible," Lindsay said; "that Llewellyn Stanhope goes home solvent."
"I don't know how he can help it now. But I have to be very firm with him. He's on his knees to me to do Ibsen. I tell him I will if he'll combine with Jimmy Finnigan and bring the Surprise Party on between the acts. The only way it would go, in this capital."
"Oh, do produce Ibsen," Alicia exclaimed. "I've never seen one of his plays—doesn't it sound terrible?"
"If people will elect to live upon a coral strand—oh, I should like to, for you and Duff here, but Ibsen is the very last man to deliver to a scratch company. He must have equal merit, or there's no meaning. You see, he makes none of the vulgar appeals. It would be a tame travesty—nobody could redeem it alone. You must keep to the old situations, the reliable old dodges, when you play in any part of Asia."
"I never shall cease to regret that I didn't see you in The Reproach of Galilee" Duff said; "everyone who knows the least bit about it said you were marvellous in that."
"Marvellous," said Alicia.
Hilda gazed straight before her for an instant without speaking. The others looked at her absent eyes. "A bazaar trick or two helped me," she said, and glanced with vivacity at any other subject that might be hanging on the wall or visible out of the window.
"And are you really invincible about not putting it on again in Calcutta?" Duff asked.