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Page 42
"Yes, I do," said the lodger, smiling. "You see, I started in to lay
siege to London without sufficient ammunition. London is a large town,
and it didn't fall as quickly as I thought it would. So I am
economizing. Mr. Lockhart's Coffee Rooms and I are no longer
strangers."
Miss Cavendish put down her cup of tea untasted and leaned toward him.
"Are you in earnest?" she asked. "For how long?"
"Oh, for the last month," replied the lodger; "they are not at all
bad--clean and wholesome and all that."
"But the suppers you gave us, and this," she cried, suddenly, waving
her hands over the pretty tea-things, "and the cake and muffins?"
"My friends, at least," said Carroll, "need not go to Lockhart's."
"And the Savoy?" asked Miss Cavendish, mournfully shaking her head. "A
dream of the past," said Carroll, waving his pipe through the smoke.
"Gatti's? Yes, on special occasions; but for necessity the
Chancellor's, where one gets a piece of the prime roast beef of Old
England, from Chicago, and potatoes for ninepence--a pot of bitter
twopence-halfpenny, and a penny for the waiter. It's most amusing on
the whole. I am learning a little about London, and some things about
myself. They are both most interesting subjects."
"Well, I don't like it," Miss Cavendish declared, helplessly. "When I
think of those suppers and the flowers, I feel--I feel like a robber."
"Don't," begged Carroll. "I am really the most happy of men--that is,
as the chap says in the play, I would be if I wasn't so damned
miserable. But I owe no man a penny and I have assets--I have �80 to
last me through the winter and two marvellous plays; and I love, next
to yourself, the most wonderful woman God ever made. That's enough."
"But I thought you made such a lot of money by writing?" asked Miss
Cavendish.
"I do--that is, I could," answered Carroll, "if I wrote the things
that sell; but I keep on writing plays that won't."
"And such plays!" exclaimed Marion, warmly; "and to think that they
are going begging!" She continued, indignantly, "I can't imagine what
the managers do want."
"I know what they don't want," said the American. Miss Cavendish
drummed impatiently on the tea-tray.
"I wish you wouldn't be so abject about it," she said. "If I were a
man I'd make them take those plays."
"How?" asked the American; "with a gun?"
"Well, I'd keep at it until they read them," declared Marion. "I'd sit
on their front steps all night and I'd follow them in cabs, and I'd
lie in wait for them at the stage-door. I'd just make them take them."
Carroll sighed and stared at the ceiling. "I guess I'll give up and go
home," he said.
"Oh, yes, do, run away before you are beaten," said Miss Cavendish,
scornfully. "Why, you can't go now. Everybody will be back in town
soon, and there are a lot of new plays coming on, and some of them are
sure to be failures, and that's our chance. You rush in with your
piece, and somebody may take it sooner than close the theatre."
"I'm thinking of closing the theatre myself," said Carroll. "What's
the use of my hanging on here?" he exclaimed. "It distresses Helen to
know I am in London, feeling about her as I do--and the Lord only
knows how it distresses me. And, maybe, if I went away," he said,
consciously, "she might miss me. She might see the difference."
Miss Cavendish held herself erect and pressed her lips together with a
severe smile. "If Helen Cabot doesn't see the difference between you
and the other men she knows now," she said, "I doubt if she ever will.
Besides--" she continued, and then hesitated.
"Well, go on," urged Carroll.
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