“I would rather you talked about yourself,” she said, “you are ever so much more interesting than these people.”
“Oh, no,” said Reggie, with a little giggle; “oh, no!”
“You are, indeed, you are,” she said earnestly.
“Oh, come,” said Reggie; “oh, come! no! I am not interesting; oh, dear no!”
His life he admitted frankly was very ordinary. All that he did was to sign a few cheques, liquidate a few debts, see a few “fellows” about “things” and “there you are,” said Reggie.
“It must be wonderful to be in a position of power,” said the girl musingly. “Of course, I come from a very poor family. We only think in shillings where you think in thousands of pounds. And it is awfully hard to realize what it feels like to order people to do things instead of being ordered.”
Reggie Boltover, who had never ordered anybody to do anything in his life and would not have dared to dispute the judgment of the innumerable managers and directors whom his sainted father had appointed in his lifetime, wondered himself what it felt like. He had often meditated, with a shudder, upon the necessity which might one day arise, for his taking the initiative in the conduct of his business. He dimly realized that, in time, all his managers and directors would die and he had dimly speculated upon the question as to who would replace them. He had a feeling that perhaps one might go to Whiteleys and order some new ones, but it had never occurred to him that at his autocratic word managers and people of that description could be made out of mud, or that an order affecting the business which he was supposed to control would be acted upon if he were to give that order.
“Well, you know,” he said, “I never really tell people to do anything. You see, I never see them except very occasionally. Of course, they make reports and all that sort of thing and I have a man who reads them so everything is all right and I just sign cheques and see a few fellows and there you are.”
Under the genial influence of her sympathetic interest he expanded a little and proved that he was not as wholly incompetent as he pretended to be. For instance, he knew that the iron works and shipbuilding yard which still bore his father’s name, and incidentally his own, made “a deuced lot of money” every year and that certain other properties made no money.
There was one property of which he spoke with great bitterness but only because his father, in his lifetime, had also spoken of that matter with similar violence and asperity. Apparently, the one redeeming feature about Boltover’s Cement Works lay in the fact that it had no manager and therefore produced no reports. It was in fact a deserted shell of a building so infamously unprofitable that Boltover senior (now in Heaven) had directed almost with his last breath, if you believed Reggie, that his name should be erased from the official designation of the company.
“You see it was bad cement; you know how cement is made, don’t you?”
“I should love to,” said the girl, her eyes shining, “I have often wondered.”
“Well,” said Reggie looking round the table for something to illustrate the object lesson, “you dig in the river and you take out a lot of stuff and you chuck it in a cart and then you chuck it into a fire and you pull it out and do something to it and there you are! That’s cement. Only our cement wasn’t cement, if you understand. That is what made the beastly thing so awkward.”
“How wonderful!” said the girl. “I shall always remember that.”
“Of course, we’ve got our eyes open,” said Reggie now fairly launched upon the story of his life, “and one of these days we shall catch a mug.”
“Catch a—?” asked the girl, puzzled.
Reggie went very pink, but he was excited and grateful at this demonstration of the girl’s refinement.
“Forgive the vulgarity, Miss—Vera; I mean we shall find a purchaser. I once nearly sold the beastly thing for £10,000 and the day the deed was to be signed, they took the poor chap away to a lunatic asylum, poor old bird, not right in his head, you know. That is why he wanted to buy our cement works. Comic, isn’t it?
“D’you know,” said Mr. Boltover, suddenly, “when I came round to the stage door that night I never expected to meet you?”
She looked at him in innocent surprise.
“Didn’t you really?” she said incredulously as though the idea had occurred to her for the first time, and then, thoughtfully, “I suppose you didn’t.”
“I didn’t expect to meet you,” repeated Mr. Boltover, who, when he had got hold of one complete sentence, held tight to it until his groping mentality had reached out and securely grasped another. “No, I didn’t expect to meet you, but I’m awfully glad. I feel I owe that young lady more than I can ever repay.”
He said this with an unusual display of sentimentality.
“That young lady” was his companion’s chorus girl friend, who at that moment was retailing to her youthful companion at the far side of the room such details of Vera’s life as she had been able to secure in a seven-day acquaintance.
“Vera’s not in our show now, of course,” she said; “I don’t think she had ever been on the stage before. She’s an awfully fresh kid. Came late to rehearsals and all that sort of thing, but I like her immensely.”
She smiled and bowed to Vera who, at that moment, had caught her eye.
“She’s very pretty,” said her companion.
“Yes; isn’t she?” agreed the girl, her interest in her friend suddenly evaporating.
But there was one in that crowded dining-room whose every disengaged moment was employed in watching the girl and her companion. It involved his getting into the way of other waiters and
