“She is very young,” said the Colonel apologetically, “and a little impetuous of speech—she talks too much, I think.”
“A pretty woman can never talk too much,” said the gallant Gregori; “she can think too much and talk too little. A person who talks is like a lighted house with all the blinds up and the doors open, you know where you are. Now, Colonel mio, how far have we got with this new scheme?”
The Colonel brought a chair in one hand and a light table in the other to where the Spaniard sat, produced from his inside-pocket a bunch of memoranda and in a few minutes the men were deep in the discussion of the most remarkable, the most startling and the most daring enterprise that Crime Street had ever undertaken.
V
A Chorus Girl at Sebo’s
Sebo’s Club was crowded, for it was the dinner hour and Sebo’s is the most extensively patronized of the dining clubs. Here, all that was beautiful, all that was smart, all that was famous and brilliant in the world of society, letters and the drama met on common ground—the inherent and universal desire which humanity has for careless comfort. A Cabinet Minister and his party sat at the next table to that presided over by a great revue actress; the owner of a Derby winner sat back to back against a famous Radical satirist. The editor of a great London daily could look across his table and without shifting his eyes could count in his field of vision the pretty dancer from the Empiredrome, a royal physician, a peer of the realm and a ragtime singer.
The big dining hall blazed with lights, the little tables were crowded together so as to leave scarcely room for the waiters who, by some mysterious dispensation of Providence, seemed able to thread their ways through impossible spaces. The noisy coon band kept up its rhythmic pandemonium in one corner of the room, but did not drown the rippling laughter and the buzz of lighthearted talk.
In the little vestibule a young man, very tall and very thin, paced the tesselated floor with that evidence of resignation which tells so eloquently the story of the Unpunctual Guest. He was very fair and very pink. His countenance was vacant and the vacancy was by no means relieved when he screwed a gold-rimmed monocle into his right eye.
Presently the glass doors swung and a girl came hurriedly toward him, holding out her gloved hand.
“I am awfully sorry I am late, Reggie,” she said with easy familiarity.
“If you were an hour late or five hours late or a day late,” said the young man with gentle ecstasy, “I should be content to wait, Miss Flemming.”
She flashed a dazzling smile at him.
“I shouldn’t be horribly shocked if you called me Vera,” she said.
The young man went pinker than ever, coughed, stuttered, ran his gloved finger inside the high upstanding collar about his thin throat, dropped his eyeglass, retrieved it and did all this in the space of four seconds, thereby betraying his perturbation and his gratitude.
“You have a table, I suppose?” said the girl when she had returned from depositing her coat.
“Rather!” said the young man, and added after a second’s thought, “Rather!”
He fussily shepherded her through the mass of tables where his own attenuation enabled him to emulate the deeds of the agile serving man and brought her to a corner table which was smothered with rare flowers. Heads were turned, sharp eyes focused the couple, some smiled, though for the girl the glances held nothing but admiration or cold-blooded appraisement, according to the sex of the observer.
“Reggie Boltover!” said one young man.
“Who is Reggie Boltover?” asked his companion.
“A human being loosely attached to a million,” was the laconic description.
The girl was radiant, the smile hardly left her face and the eyes which glanced shyly up to her tall companion were full of wonder and delight.
“So this is Sebo’s,” she said. “Isn’t it a dreadfully wicked place?”
Reggie Boltover’s face creased alarmingly—he, too, was smiling.
“My dear Miss—my dear Vera,” he said boldly, “should I bring you to a wicked place, now I ask you; should I bring you to a wicked place, should I?”
His conversational powers were not brilliant but his heart was pure. He was not really a wicked young man about town and his chief wickedness lay in his implicit belief that he was. He had met the girl one night by accident. A more daring friend of his, and nearer approaching Reggie’s own ideal of doggishness, had induced him (he protesting feebly) to call at a stage-door where he was meeting a charming friend to take her to supper. The charming friend in the generous large-hearted way of chorus girls had introduced her friend, Vera Flemming, a newcomer to the ranks of the chorus, and they had all supped together and Vera had been very charming to Mr. Reggie Boltover and he had asked her to go with him up the river and had serious thoughts, because of her evident refinement, of introducing her to his mother, which shows that Reggie had reached the most dangerous stage of infatuation. There was really nothing wrong about Reggie Boltover and nothing remarkably terrible about this strangely initiated friendship.
Chorus girls are merely shopgirls with a taste for caviar and peaches. They are no more sinful than their sisters in the same social strata and the only difference between them is that, whilst they are exposed to similar temptations, the chorus girl has a larger field to pick from and the candidates are much more presentable. A shopgirl accepts the hospitality of a teashop, the chorus-girl goes to the Ritz. Both have one consuming passion, a desire for good food, for which they do not have to pay.
Reggie Boltover, who, to do him justice, knew everybody, entertained the girl for half-an-hour by pointing out the various
