The long red automobile that had been waiting near the sidewalk outside the Harrison gateway, answered to the electric starter with a tigerish snore and, as the clutch was thrown on, bore out the feline similitude with a four-yard leap that brought it diagonally out into rapid motion down the street.
"Any good with the mitts?" asked Mr. Masterman jocularly, turning toward Daisy his globular face with its lightish eyebrows and large flexible lips, that rolled and curled like leaf-edges with perennial relish of the faculty of speech.
"Aw, talk sense, Bob," smoothly intervened Miss Stella Yockley—she whom Jean had described as "a thick-legged wench that rolls her eyes aboot"—"Miss Nixon's a lady—can't you see! A perfect lady—huh?" And, as though to imply that this was a joke, from which Mr. Masterman was excluded, Miss Yockley, under cover of a hand raised to dab at her front hair, winked at Daisy.
Daisy responded with a twinkling, half-smiling, non-committal look, and then turned her face streetward. The sensation of the swift ride along the thoroughfare, with its glittering electric lamps, its traffic roar, and its trampling—these influences, and the anticipation of risk in the coming "little party" at an unnamed place, with men of untested tendencies, had strung the girl's nerves to a pleasant tension of excitement. Talk would interfere with her enjoyment of the feeling which thrilled her. Besides, Mr. Masterman's face pained Daisy. These were the reasons she chose to watch the sights of the street in preference to talking.
Cutting corners with a lawless brevity after he past the last point policeman, Mr. Masterman finally brought his car to an adroit and easy halt in a line of others before the door of a big theatre. Dismounting, he swung Miss Yockley to the curb. Daisy hopped out of the tonneau without aid. The three passed through the vestibule; and, as they confronted the ticket-taker, Mr. Masterman said, tersely, "Girls is with me, Harry", and the official ogling Daisy a little, stood docilely aside.
A few moments later, Daisy Nixon, entering a curtained way and sitting down alongside Miss Yockley on green plush seats in the lower right-hand box, had her first look at a stage set for a boxing match.
"What are the ropes for?" she said to Miss Yockley, as she stared across the bare stage floor, with its Spartan garniture—the hempen square, the backless wooden stools facing each other diagonally, the battered water-buckets, each with its bobbing sponge.
"You can search me, honey," absently returned Miss Stella; who was too busy searching, with the eyes that "rolled aboot", for acquaintances among the audience, to pay much attention, either to her "kid" companion or to the squared "ring" which she had, as it were, seen a hundred times but never looked at. Miss Yockley had always been too much occupied with observing the human and masculine element in "fights", to notice the paraphernalia.
Continuing to watch the stage with a kind of unexplainable fascination, Daisy Nixon presently had her interest rewarded by the appearance of a slim and agile young man in a sleeveless gymnasium shirt, gray trousers, and canvas shoes, whose coming seemed to be the signal for the surging-in of a crowd from both wings, filling the rows of empty chairs at the ringside. Among this crowd, which included newspaper reporters, moneyed patrons of the boxing bouts, and near friends or relatives of those who were to take part in the matches of the evening, Daisy soon picked out the large ingratiating face of Mr. Masterman.