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Page 88
On the last night he took her to dinner--a small French restaurant
in a back street in Soho. He had heard about it somewhere. Edith
classed it as soon as she entered. It was too retiring, too demure.
Its very location was clandestine.
But he never knew. He was divided that night between joy at getting
to his regiment and grief at leaving her. Rather self-engrossed, she
thought.
They had a table by an open grate fire, with a screen "to shut off
the draft," the waiter said. It gave the modest meal a delightfully
homey air, their isolation and the bright coal fire. For the first
time they learned the joys of mussels boiled in milk, of French
_souffl�_ and other things.
At the end of the evening he took her back to her cheap hotel in a
taxicab. She expected him to kiss her. Her experience of taxicabs
had been like that. But he did not. He said very little on the way
home, but sat well back and eyed her wistful eyes. She chattered to
cover his silence--of rehearsals, of--with reservations--of Lethway,
of the anticipated London opening. She felt very sad herself. He had
been a tie to America, and he had been much more than that. Though
she did not realise it, he had had a profound effect on her. In
trying to seem what he thought her she was becoming what he thought
her. Her old reckless attitude toward life was gone, or was going.
The day before she had refused an invitation to a night club, and
called herself a fool for doing it. But she had refused.
Not that he had performed miracles with her. She was still frankly a
dweller on the neutral ground. But to that instinct that had kept
her up to that time what she would have called "straight" had been
added a new refinement. She was no longer the reckless and romping
girl whose abandon had caught Lethway's eye.
She had gained a soul, perhaps, and lost a livelihood.
When they reached the hotel he got out and went in with her. The
hall porter was watching and she held out her hand. But he shook his
head.
"If I touched your hand," he said, "I would have to take you in my
arms. Good-bye, dear."
"Good-bye," she said. There were tears in her eyes. It was through a
mist that she saw him, as the elevator went up, standing at salute,
his eyes following her until she disappeared from sight.
IV
Things were going wrong with Lethway. The management was ragging
him, for one thing.
"Give the girl time," he said almost viciously, at the end of a
particularly bad rehearsal. "She's had a long voyage and she's
tired. Besides," he added, "these acts never do go at rehearsal.
Give me a good house at the opening and she'll show you what she can
do."
But in his soul he was worried. There was a change in Edith O'Hara.
Even her voice had altered. It was not only her manner to him. That
was marked enough, but he only shrugged his shoulders over it. Time
enough for that when the production was on.
He had engaged a hoyden, and she was by way of becoming a lady.
During the first week or so he had hoped that it was only the
strangeness of her surroundings. He had been shrewd enough to lay
some of it, however, to Cecil's influence.
"When your soldier boy gets out of the way," he sneered one day in
the wings, "perhaps you'll get down to earth and put some life in
your work."
But to his dismay she grew steadily worse. Her dancing was delicate,
accurate, even graceful, but the thing the British public likes to
think typically American, a sort of breezy swagger, was gone. To
bill her in her present state as the Madcap American would be sheer
folly.
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