ready if ever it catches on. Ah, here comes one of the young fools-I'll watch him-'
He came, clothed as in a grey skin that showed the beautiful modelling of his limbs. His face glowed.
'Ouida's Apollo,' she thought, but in the very mockery she trembled, struck as by a lightning shaft. The blackness was sucked up into fire and light. 'Am I in the way?' she said with her most bewitching smile.
He raised his hat. 'I was afraid you might have been struck.'
'Perhaps I was,' she could not help saying.
'Oh, gracious, are you hurt?' His voice was instantly caressing.
'Do I look an object for ambulances?'
He smiled dazzlingly. 'You look awfully jolly.' Later Eileen remembered how she had taken this reply for a line of poetry.
A week later the Hon. Reginald Winsor, younger brother of an English Earl, was teaching Eileen golf.
It had been a week of ecstasy.
She thought of Reginald the last thing at night and the first thing in the morning and dreamed of him all night.
Now she knew what her life had lacked-to be caught up into another's personality, to lose one's petty individuality in-in what? Surely not in a larger; she couldn't be so blind as that. In what then? Ah, yes, in Nature. He was gloriously elemental. He wasn't himself. He was the masculine. Yes, that was the correlative element her being needed. The mere manliness of his pipe made its aroma in his clothes adorable. Or was it his big simplicity, in which she could bury all her torturing complexity? Oh, to nestle in it and be at rest. Yet she held him at arm's length. When they shook hands her nerves thrilled, but she was the colder outwardly for very fear of herself.
On the ninth day he proposed.
Eileen knew it would be that day. Lying in bed that morning, she found herself caught by her old impersonal whimsy. 'I'm a fever, and on the ninth day of me the man comes out in a rash proposal.' Ah, but this time she was in a tertian, too. What a difference from those other proposals-proper or improper. Her mind ran over half a dozen, with a touch of pity she had not felt at the time. Poor Bob Maper, poor Jolly Jack Jenkins, if it was like this they felt! But was it her fault? No man could say she had led him on-except, perhaps, the Hon. Reginald, and towards him her intentions were honourable, she told herself smiling. But the jest carried itself farther and more stingingly. Could he make an 'honourable' she told herself her? Ah, God, was she worthy of him, of his simple manhood? And would he continue proposing, if she told him she was Nelly O'Neill? And what of his noble relatives? No, no, she must not run risks. She was only Eileen O'Keeffe, she had never left Ireland save for the Convent. The rest was a nightmare. How glad she was that nobody knew!
The proposal duly took place in a bunker, while Eileen was whimsically vituperating her ball. The fascination of her virginal
'Now it is coming,' she thought, and suddenly froze to a spectator of the marionette show. As the Hon. Reginald went through his performance, she felt with a shudder of horror over what brink she had nearly stepped. The man was merely a magnificent animal! She, with her heart, her soul, her brain, mated to that! Like a convict chained to a log. Not worthy of him forsooth! 'There's a gulf between us,' she thought, 'and I nearly fell down it.' And the Half-and-Half rose before her, clamouring, pungent, deliciously seductive.
'Dear Mr. Winsor,' she listened with no less interest to her own part in the marionette performance, 'it's really too bad of you. Just as I was getting on so nicely, too!'
'Is that all you feel about-about our friendship?'
'All? Didn't you undertake to teach me golf? I haven't the faintest desire not to go on ... as soon as we have escaped from this wretched bunker. Come! Did you say the niblick?'
Reginald's manners were too good to permit him to swear, even at golf.
'One's body is like an Irish mud-cabin,' Eileen reflected. 'It shelters both a soul and a pig.'
XV.
Nelly O'Neill threw herself into her work with greater ardour than ever. But her triumphs were shadowed by worries. She was nervous lest the Hon. Reginald should turn up at one of her Halls-she had three now; she was afraid her voice was spoiling in the smoky atmosphere; sometimes the image of the Hon. Reginald came back reproachfully, sometimes tantalisingly. Oh, why was he so stupid? Or was it she who had been stupid?
Then there was the apprehension of the end of her career at the Lee Carters'. The young generation was nearly grown up. The eldest boy she even suspected of music-halls. He might stumble upon her.
Her popularity, too, was beginning to frighten her. Adventurous young gentlemen followed her in cabs-cabs were now a necessity of her triple appearance-and she never dared drive quite to her door or even the street. Bracelets she always returned, if the address was given; flowers she sent to hospitals, anonymous gifts to her family. Nobody ever saw her wearing his badge.
A sketch of her even found its way to one of Mrs. Lee Carter's journals.
'Why, she looks something like me!' Eileen said boldly.
'You flatter yourself,' said Mrs. Lee Carter. 'You're both Irish, that's all. But I don't see why these music-hall minxes should be pictured in respectable household papers.'
'Some people say that the only real talent is now to be found in the Halls,' said Eileen.
'Well, I hope it'll stay there,' rejoined her mistress, tartly. Eileen recalled this conversation a few nights later, when she met Master Harold Lee Carter outside the door at midnight with a rival latch-key.
'Been to a theatre, Miss O'Keeffe?' asked her whilom pupil.
'No; have you?'
'Well, not exactly a theatre!'
'Why, what do you mean?'
'Sort of half-and-half place, you know.'
By the icy chill at her heart at his innocent phrase, she knew how she dreaded discovery and clung to her social status.
'What is a half-and-half place?' she asked smiling.
'Oh, comic songs and tumblers and you can smoke.'
'No? You're not really allowed to smoke in a theatre?'
'Yes, we are. They call it a music-hall-it's great fun. But don't tell the mater.'
'You naughty boy!'
'I don't see it. All the chaps go.'
She shook her head. 'Not the nicest.'
'Oh, that's tommyrot,' he said disrespectfully. 'Their women folk don't know-that's all.'
Eileen now began to feel like a criminal round whom the toils thicken. In the most fashionable of her three Halls, she sang a little French song. And she had taught Master Harold his French.
Of course, even if Nelly were seen by Eileen's friends or acquaintances, detection was not sure. Eileen was always in such sedate gowns, never low-cut, her manners were so suppressed, her hair done so differently, and what a difference hair made! In fact, it was in her private life that she felt herself more truly the actress. On the boards her real secret self seemed to flash forth, full of verve, dash, roguery, devilry. Should she take to a wig, or to character songs in appropriate costumes? No, she would run the risk. It gave more spice to life. Every evening now was an adventure, nay three adventures, and when she snuggled herself up at midnight in her demure white bed, overlooked by the crucifix, she felt like the hunted were-wolf, safely back in human shape. And she became more audacious, letting herself go, so as to widen the chasm between Nelly and Eileen, and make anybody who should suspect her be sure he was wrong. And occasionally she paid for all this fever and gaiety by fits of the blackest melancholy.
She had gradually dropped her habit of prayer, but in one of her dark moods she found herself slipping to her knees and crying: 'Oh, Holy Mother, look down on Thy distressed daughter, and deliver her from the body of this death. So many wooers and no spark of love in herself; a woman who sings love-songs with lips no man has touched, a lone-of-soul who can live neither with the respectable nor with the Bohemians, who loves you,
