Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 20th century -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Politicians -- Fiction
"All right; dinner at eight. We shall have lots of time--she doesn't
come on till nearly ten. Meet me at the Artemis at eight. Till then, old
chap!" Harry darted after a lady who had favoured him with a gracious
bow as she passed by, a moment before.
Here was an evening-out for Andy Hayes, whose conscience had suggested
"Hamlet" and whose finances had dictated the pit. He went home to his
lodgings off Russell Square all smiles, and spent a laborious hour
trying to get the creases out of his dress coat. "Well, I shall enjoy an
evening like that just for once," he said out loud as he laboured.
"I've got her and another girl," Harry announced when Andy turned up at
the Artemis. "The nuisance is that Billy Foot here insists on coming
too, so we shall be a man over. I've told him I don't want him, but the
fellow will come."
"I'm certainly coming," said the tall long-faced young man--for Billy
Foot was still several years short of forty--to whom Andy had listened
with such admiration at Meriton. In private life he was not oppressively
epigrammatic or logical, and not at all ruthless; and everybody called
him "Billy," which in itself did much to deprive him of his terrors.
The Artemis was a small and luxurious club in King Street. Why it was
called the "Artemis" nobody knew. Billy Foot said that the name had been
chosen just because nobody would know why it had been chosen--it was a
bad thing, he maintained, to label a club. Harry, however, conjectured
that the name indicated that the club was half-way between the Athenæum
and the Turf--which you might take in the geographical sense or in any
other you pleased.
Andy ate of several foods that he had never tasted before and drank
better wine than he had ever drunk before. His physique and his steady
brain made any moderate quantity of wine no more than water to him.
Harry Belfield, on the contrary, responded felicitously to even his
first glass of champagne; his eyes grew bright and his spirit gay. Any
shadow cast over him by his interview with Mrs. Freere was not long in
vanishing.
They enjoyed themselves so well that a cab had only just time to land
them at their place of entertainment before the Nun, whose name was Miss
Doris Flower, came on the stage. She was having a prodigious success
because she did look like a nun and sang songs that a nun might really
be supposed to sing--and these things, being quite different from what
the public expected, delighted the public immensely. When Miss Flower,
whose performance was of high artistic merit, sang about the baby which
she might have had if she had not been a nun, and in the second song
(she was on her death-bed in the second song, but this did not at all
impair her vocal powers) about the angel whom she saw hovering over her
bed, and the angel's likeness to her baby sister who had died in
infancy, the public cried like a baby itself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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