"What on earth do you mean?"
"The management are getting dissatisfied, and we know what that means."
The pale face flushed poppy red.
"They can't help themselves," she said eagerly. "I have a contract for six months. They cannot cancel it, you must know they can't, and it's not very likely I shall allow myself to be played fast and loose with as the fancy takes them."
"But if you're not able to fulfil your share of the contract—"
"Who says I am not?" cried Bella fiercely. "Old Robertson is a fool, and if he thinks I'm going to put up with any hanky-panky, he's jolly well mistaken. Let him try it on, that's all! I should immediately take steps to enforce my rights, the law is on my side, that's clear enough."
"I don't know! You heard what Doss said—about how you looked from the front; and others have got their eyesight as well as him, and can see you are not well and not—"
"Not fit to sing—that's what you are driving at?"
Saidie was silent.
"I tell you I will sing. Nothing and no one shall stop me. I shall just defy them all, and go on, and there's no law in England to stop me."
"If you are not a goose, Bella, I never saw one! What in all the world keeps you on the boards, I cannot see. Here's a man come over from N'York with the intention of marrying you; a man who is earning his hundred dollars a week, and you turn up your nose at him. I can't understand you. You seemed proud enough of him a week or two back; but now all on a sudden, for no earthly reason, you show him the cold shoulder."
"I suppose I can please myself," answered Bella, and her lip quivered, and the tears began to roll down her cheeks.
"I wish to God I had never left—Jack," she said weakly.
Whereupon Saidie gave her what she was pleased to call a "piece of her mind" as to the insane folly of any such speech, the result of which was that Bella wept and coughed herself into a
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