'The very thing. Bring your dolls along and arrange your groups, while Effie recites. You will do that, Effie?'
'I will do anything that will help Archie.'
'Very well, then. We will get an evening fixed as soon as possible. I fear we shall have to wait a week at least. I will get my dramatic critic and a few more people, and we will have a private performance of our own. And then we shall defy this critic who said the piece was worthless—and then wanted to buy it and to bring it out as his own. I could not have believed,' she added, 'that there were two such impudent pretenders and liars to be found in the whole of London.'
'Two?' asked Ellie, changing colour. 'There can be only one.'
CHAPTER XIV
AN HONOURABLE PROPOSAL
At the same time Mr. Alec Feilding, whose ears ought to have been burning, was engaged in a serious conversation in his own studio with Armorel's companion. The conversation took the form of reproach. 'I expected,' he said—'I had a right to expect—greater devotion—more attention to business. It was not for play that you undertook the charge of this girl. How long have you been with her? Three months? And no more influence with her than when you began.'
'Not a bit more,' Mrs. Elstree replied. She had of course taken the most comfortable chair by the fire. 'Not a bit, my dear Alec. What is more, I never shall have any influence over her. A society girl I could manage. I know what she wants, and how she looks at things. With such a girl as Armorel I am powerless.'
'She is a woman, I suppose.' He occupied a commanding position on his own hearthrug, towering above his visitor, but yet he did not command her.
'Therefore, you think, open to flattery and artful wiles. She is a woman, and yet, strange to say, not open to flattery.'