A sudden gravity descended upon Jill. The words had reminded her of the thing which she was perpetually striving to keep out of her thoughts.

"He said he wanted to be there to keep an eye on me."

Gravity is infectious. Wally's smile disappeared. He, too, had been recalled to thoughts which were not pleasant.

Wally crumbled his roll. There was a serious expression on his face.

"Freddie was quite right. I didn't think he had so much sense."

"Freddie was not right," flared Jill. The recollection of her conversation with that prominent artist still had the power to fire her independent soul. "I'm not a child. I can look after myself. What I do is my own business."

"I'm afraid you're going to find that your business is several people's business. I am interested in it myself. I don't like your being on the stage. Now bite my head off!"

"It's very kind of you to bother about me...."

"I said 'Bite my head off!' I didn't say 'Freeze me!' I take the licence of an old friend who in his time has put worms down your back, and I repeat--I don't like your being on the stage."

"I shouldn't have thought you would have been so"--Jill sought for a devastating adjective--"so mid-Victorian!"

"As far as you are concerned, I'm the middest Victorian in existence.

Mid is my middle name." Wally met her indignant gaze squarely.

"I--do--not--like--your--being--on--the--stage! Especially in any company which Ike Goble is running."

"Why Mr. Goble particularly?"

"Because he is not the sort of man you ought to be coming in contact with."

"What nonsense!"

"It isn't nonsense at all. I suppose you've read a lot about the morals of theatrical managers...."

"Yes. And it seemed to be exaggerated and silly."

"So it is. There's nothing wrong with most of them. As a general thing, they are very decent fellows--extraordinarily decent if you think of the position they are in. I don't say that in a business way there's much they won't try to put over on you. In the theatre, when it comes to business, everything goes except biting and gouging.

'There's never a law of G.o.d or man runs north of fifty-three.' If you alter that to 'north of Forty-first Street' it doesn't scan as well, but it's just as true. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the Golden Rule is suspended there. You get used to it after you have been in the theatre for a while, and, except for leaving your watch and pocket-book at home when you have to pay a call on a manager and keeping your face to him so that he can't get away with your back collar-stud, you don't take any notice of it. It's all a game. If a manager swindles you, he wins the hole and takes the honour. If you foil him, you are one up. In either case, it makes no difference to the pleasantness of your relations. You go on calling him by his first name, and he gives you a couple of cigars out of his waistcoat pocket and says you're a good kid. There is nothing personal in it. He has probably done his best friend out of a few thousand dollars the same morning, and you see them lunching together after the ceremony as happily as possible. You've got to make allowances for managers. They are the victims of heredity. When a burglar marries a hat-check girl, their offspring goes into the theatrical business automatically, and he can't shake off the early teaching which he imbibed at his father's knee. But morals...."

Wally broke off to allow the waiter to place a fried sole before him.

Waiters always select the moment when we are talking our best to intrude themselves.

"As regards morals," resumed Wally, "that is a different matter. Most managers are respectable, middle-aged men with wives and families.

They are in the business to make money, and they don't want anything else out of it. The girls in their companies are like so many clerks to them, just machines that help to bring the money in. They don't know half a dozen of them to speak to. But our genial Ike is not like that." Wally consumed a mouthful of sole. "Ike Goble is a bad citizen.

He paws! He's a slinker and a prowler and a leerer. He's a pest and a worm! He's fat and soft and flabby. He has a greasy soul, a withered heart, and an eye like a codfish. Not knocking him, of course!" added Wally magnanimously. "Far be it from me to knock anyone! But, speaking with the utmost respect and viewing him in the most favourable light, he is a combination of tom-cat and the things you see when you turn over a flat stone! Such are the reasons why I am sorry that you are in his company."

Jill had listened to this diatribe with a certain uneasiness. Her brief encounters with Mr. Goble told her that every word was probably true. She could still feel the unpleasant sensation of being inspected by the eye which Wally had compared--quite justly--to that of a codfish. But her pride forbade any admission of weakness.

"I can take care of myself," she said.

"I don't doubt it," said Wally. "And you could probably take care of yourself if you fell into a muddy pond. But I shouldn't like to stand on the bank and watch you doing it. I know what girls in the chorus have to go through. Hanging about for hours in draughts, doing nothing, while the princ.i.p.als go through their scenes, and yelled at if they try to relieve the tedium of captivity with a little light conversation...."

"Yes," admitted Jill. "There has been a good lot of that."

"There always is. I believe if the stage-carpenter was going to stick a screw in a flat, they would call a chorus-rehearsal to watch him do it.... Jill, you must get out of it. It's no life for you. The work...."

"I like the work."

"While it's new, perhaps, but...."

Jill interrupted him pa.s.sionately.

"Oh, can't you understand!" she cried. "I want the work. I need it. I want something to do, something to occupy my mind. I hate talking about it, but you know how things are with me. Freddie must have told you. Even if he didn't, you must have guessed, meeting me here all alone and remembering how things were when we last met. You must understand! Haven't you ever had a terrible shock or a dreadful disappointment that seemed to smash up the whole world? And didn't you find that the only possible thing to do was to work and work and work as hard as ever you could? When I first came to America, I nearly went mad. Uncle Chris sent me down to a place on Long Island, and I had nothing to do all day but think. I couldn't stand it. I ran away and came to New York and met Nelly Bryant and got this work to do. It saved me. It kept me busy all day and tired me out and didn't give me time to think. The harder it is, the better it suits me. It's an antidote. I simply wouldn't give it up now. As for what you were saying, I must put up with that. The other girls do, so why shouldn't I?"

"They are toughened to it."

"Then I must get toughened to it. What else is there for me to do? I must do something."

"Marry me!" said Wally, reaching across the table and putting his hand on hers. The light in his eyes lit up his homely face like a lantern.

III

The suddenness of it startled Jill into silence. She s.n.a.t.c.hed her hand away and drew back, looking at him in wonderment. She was confusedly aware of a babble of sound--people talking, people laughing, the orchestra playing a lively tune. All her senses seemed to have become suddenly more acute. She was intensely alive to small details. Then, abruptly, the whole world condensed itself into two eyes that were fastened upon hers--compelling eyes which she felt a panic desire to avoid.

She turned her head away, and looked out into the restaurant. It seemed incredible that all these people, placidly intent upon their food and their small talk, should not be staring at her, wondering what she was going to say; nudging each other and speculating. Their detachment made her feel alone and helpless. She was nothing to them and they did not care what happened to her, just as she had been nothing to those frozen marshes down at Brookport. She was alone in an indifferent world, with her own problems to settle for herself.

Other men had asked Jill to marry them--a full dozen of them, here and there in country houses and at London dances, before she had met and loved Derek Underhill; but nothing that she had had in the way of experience had prepared her for Wally. These others had given her time to marshal her forces, to collect herself, to weigh them thoughtfully in the balance. Before speaking, they had signalled their devotion in a hundred perceptible ways--by their pinkness, their stammering awkwardness, by the gla.s.sy look in their eyes. They had not shot a proposal at her like a bullet from out of the cover of a conversation that had nothing to do with their emotions at all.

Yet, now that the shock of it was dying away, she began to remember signs she would have noticed, speeches which ought to have warned her....

"Wally!" she gasped.

She found that he affected her in an entirely different fashion from the luckless dozen of those London days. He seemed to matter more, to be more important, almost--though she rebelled at the word--more dangerous.

"Let me take you out of it all! You aren't fit for this sort of life.

I can't bear to see you...."

Jill bent forward and touched his hand. He started as though he had been burned. The muscles of his throat were working.

"Wally, it's--" She paused for a word. "Kind" was horrible. It would have sounded cold, almost supercilious. "Sweet" was the sort of thing she could imagine Lois Denham saying to her friend Izzy. She began her sentence again. "You're a dear to say that, but...."

Wally laughed chokingly.

"You think I'm altruistic? I'm not. I'm just as selfish and self-centred as any other man who wants a thing very badly. I'm as altruistic as a child crying for the moon. I want you to marry me because I love you, because there never was anybody like you, because you're the whole world, because I always have loved you. I've been dreaming about you for a dozen years, thinking about you, wondering about you--wondering where you were, what you were doing, how you looked. I used to think that it was just sentimentality, that you merely stood for a time of my life when I was happier than I have ever been since. I used to think that you were just a sort of peg on which I was hanging a pleasant sentimental regret for days which could never come back. You were a memory that seemed to personify all the other memories of the best time of my life. You were the G.o.ddess of old a.s.sociations. Then I met you in London, and it was different. I wanted you--_you_! I didn't want you because you recalled old times and were a.s.sociated with dead happiness, I wanted _you_! I knew I loved you directly you spoke to me at the theatre that night of the fire. I loved your voice and your eyes and your smile and your courage. And then you told me you were engaged. I might have expected it, but I couldn't keep my jealousy from showing itself, and you snubbed me as I deserved. But now ... things are different now. Everything's different, except my love."

Jill turned her face to the wall beside her. A man at the next table, a corpulent, red-faced man, had begun to stare. He could have heard nothing, for Wally had spoken in a low voice; but plainly he was aware that something more interesting was happening at their table than at any of the other tables, and he was watching with a bovine inquisitiveness which affected Jill with a sense of outrage. A moment before, she had resented the indifference of the outer world. Now, this one staring man seemed like a watching mult.i.tude. There were tears in her eyes, and she felt that the red-faced man suspected it.

"Wally...." Her voice broke. "It's impossible."

"Why? Why, Jill?"