“Well, well, we'll see,” said the stage manager. He was looking at her with glittering eyes.
“Do you know, my dear, you are a very fine-looking young woman?”
Glory's head was down, her face was flushed, and she was turning her mother's pearl ring around her finger. He thought she was overwhelmed by his praises, and coming closer, he said:
“Dare say you've got a good stage figure too, eh? Pooh! Only business, you know! But you mustn't be shy with me, my dear. And besides, if I am to do all this for you, you must do something for me sometimes.”
She hardly heard him. Her eyes were still glistening with the far-off look of one who gazes on a beautiful vision.
“You are so good,” she said. “I don't know what to say, or how to thank you.”
“This way,” he whispered, and leaning over to her he lifted her face and kissed her.
Then her poor dream of glory and grandeur and happiness was dispelled in a moment, and she awoke with a sense of outrage and shame. The man's praises were flattery; his predictions were a pretence; he had not really meant it at all, and she had been so simple as to believe everything.
“Oh!” she said, with the feeble, childish cry of one who has received a pistol wound in battle. And then she rose and turned to go. But the stage manager, who was laughing noisily out of his hot red face, stepped between her and the door.
“My dear child, you can't mean—a trifle like that—!”