Mark wondered why Margot thought that Rand and the woman quarrelled. But he shed the wonder. He liked Washington especially as the pale city showed itself now in a vapour where the abiding leaves seemed glazed in their red and yellow along the streets. Olive knew people here. There was a tea with a British attaché. Margot’s rose cloth suit gleamed about the dancing floor of the restaurant. Gurdy had friends who were produced, fell subject to Margot and came between the acts that night to lean over the girl’s chair in the box of the big theatre. “Todgers Intrudes” went its placid course. Rand gave, Mark fancied, an excellent imitation of an English conservative. The packed house laughed at the right points. Margot’s face rippled so eagerly that Mark wanted to kiss it and covertly held her hand below the rail. Why, this was the pretty, gentle sort of nonsense eighteen years would relish! A pity it had no staying wit. A pity this fragile, polished man she so admired wasn’t a real comedian. Mark looked at Gurdy’s stolid boredom and the fine chest hidden by the dinner jacket beyond Olive’s bare shoulders. It might be as well to let Gurdy tell Margot the play wouldn’t do for New York. Mark shrank from that. Gurdy could put the thing much better in his cool, bred fashion.—Here and there men were leaving the theatre with an air of final retirement. In the opposite box there was a waving of feathers. How well Cora Boyle could use a fan!—A youngster with curly orange hair slipped into his box as the second curtain fell. Gurdy introduced young Theodore Jannan to Olive and Margot, then to Mark. Mr. Jannan had come over from Philadelphia to do something in Washington. This play—the Jannan heir bit off a “rotten”—was advertised as coming to Philadelphia next week.
“Opens there Monday,” said Mark.
“My mother’s giving a baby dance for my sister. Couldn’t you bring Miss Walling, Gurdy? Monday night.”
How smoothly Margot said she’d like to come to a dance at Mrs. Apsley Jannan’s house in Philadelphia! The nonsense of social position! An illusion. A little training, a little charm, good clothes.—A Healy, one of Margot’s cousins, had risen to be a foreman in one of the Jannan steel mills.—Gurdy had played football with this pleasant lad at Saint Andrew’s school. Who on earth would ever know or care that Margot and Gurdy were born on a farm? The last curtain fell. Margot wanted to dance. Russell came to join the party. They went to a restaurant and found a table at the edge of the oval floor. Margot’s yellow frock was swept off into the florid seething on Gurdy’s arm. Russell poured brandy neatly into the coffee pot and shrugged to Mark.
“Bad sign. Fifteen or twenty men left in the second act. We’ll have a vile time in Philadelphia, Lady Ilden. It’s a queer town on plays.—There come the Rands.”
A headwaiter lifted a “Reserved” sign from a table across the floor. Cora Boyle and her husband appeared in the light threaded by cigarette smoke. The actress draped a green and black skirt carelessly, refused to dance with a British officer in a trim pantomime, bowed slowly to Mark who was taken with fright. She’d want to talk about this drivelling play and before her slight, quiet husband. He slipped a bill under the edge of Russell’s plate.
“Bring Olive back to the hotel will you Russell? I’m all in. ’Night, Olive.”
His retreat through the smoky tables was comic. Russell fingered his chin. Olive ended by laughing, “He’s ridiculously timid about her.”
The director patted his bald forehead and drank some coffee. He said, “It happens that he’s got some reason. Miss Boyle’s bad tempered and an inveterate liar. She’s fond of her husband and she seems to think this comedy will have a New York run. Mr. Walling means to let it die on the road, naturally. She won’t like that. She’ll talk. Her voice will be loud all up and down Broadway.”
“But—surely he’s callous to that sort of thing?”