twinkling, with quilted slippers to match. Then Patsy’s eager fingers drew forth a dark emerald velvet, with bodice and [Pg 41]panniers of gold lace, and she clasped it ecstatically in her arms. [Pg 41] “Miriam always had divine taste, but the faeries must have guided her hand for the choosing of this. Sure, I’d be feeling like a king’s daughter if I wasn’t so weak and heartsick. I feel more like a young gosling that some one has coaxed out of its shell a day too soon. Is it the effect of Billy Burgeman, I wonder, or the left-overs from the City Hospital, or an overdose of foolishness—or hunger, just?” “Miss St. Regis” dined in her own room, and she dined like a king’s daughter, with an appetite whetted by weeks of convalescing, charity fare. Even the possible appearance at any minute of her original self offered no terrors for her in the presence of such a soul-satisfying, hunger-appeasing feast. At nine-thirty that evening, when the manager sent the hall-boy to call her, she looked every inch the king’s daughter she had dined. The hall-boy, accustomed to “creations,” gave her a frank stare of admiration, which Patsy noted out of the tail of her eye. She was ravishing. The green and gold brought out the tawny red glint of her hair, which was bound with two gold bands about the head, ending [Pg 42]in tiny emerald clasps over the barely discoverable tips of her ears; little gold shoes twinkled in and out of the clinging green as she walked. [Pg 42] “Faith! I feel like a whiff of Old Ireland herself,” was Patsy O’Connell’s subconscious comment as “Miss St. Regis” crossed the stage; and something of the feeling must have been wafted across the footlights to the audience, for it drew in its breath with a little gasp of genuine appreciation. She heard it and was grateful for the few seconds it gave her to look at the program the manager had handed her as she was entering. It had never occurred to her that Miss St. Regis might arrange her program beforehand, that the audience might be expecting something definite and desired in the form of entertainment. It took all the control of a well-ordered Irish head to keep her from bolting for the little stage door after one glance at the paper. Her eye had caught the impersonation of two American actresses she had never seen, the reading of a Hawaiian love poem she had never heard of, and scenes from two plays she had never read. It was all too deliciously, absurdly horrible for words;
Prev.
Back
Top