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Inward composure soon returned, though not outward, and in due course histrionics commenced. First the sprain business. None of you do it better, ladies, whatever you may think. David had to carry her a bit. But she was too wise to be a bore. Next, the heroic business: would be put down, would walk, possible or not; would not be a trouble to her kind friends. Then the martyr smiling through pain.
Jacob called for his daughter; he had bought a ruby necklace for her, and wanted to hear her say what a kind, thoughtful, dear old dad he was. There was a brief search in the house for her, and then came Annette, glowing with the pure flame of truth and loyalty well mixed with envy and histrionics.
A war-bride!" But Paliser, who had his fill, was rising and, abandoning histrionics, she resumed: "The 24th at eight; don't forget!" Then as he passed from the portal, the priestess lifted her hands. "What a fish! Fast or loose, what a fish!" Above her Mammon glowed, behind her leered Priapus. Through the sunny streets, Paliser drove to the Athenæum, where everybody was talking war.
That was what had struck her from the moment she entered the police station the cool, business-like fashion in which these men had dealt with the situation. There were no histrionics. They might have been clerks engaged in some monotonous work for all the emotion they evinced. They treated her as impersonally as though she was a bale of goods about which there was some dispute.
"It is no mere flirtation," said Van, gravely. "My intentions are serious. You may depend Mademoiselle Sendel understands them as such." "Serious! you don't mean that you want to marry her?" "Unquestionably I do. It is my only chance." "Your only chance!" I repeated, considerably puzzled. "Are you about to turn actor, and do you trust to her for instruction in histrionics?" "Not exactly.
The orchestra men, too, learned to like him. They discovered that, with all his public histrionics, he was on the level as a musician. He is a merciless task master, but in rehearsals he gives himself no airs. Dressed in an old pair of pants and a disreputable brown woolen sweater, which he has worn in private since the day he landed in Boston, he works like a stevedore.
Without consciously determining whither he would go, he followed the streets toward the house of Mr. Strathmore, in that strange yet not uncommon state of mind in which a man knows fully what he is doing, yet assures himself that he has no purpose. When at last he found himself ringing the bell, Wynne carried his private histrionics so far that he told himself that he was surprised to be there.
At such times she astonished him by taking his most solemn histrionics with flippant incredulity, and even burlesquing them. But he could see, all the same, that he had caught her fancy, and he admired the skill with which she punished his neglect when they met in New York.
The lady having retired to her dressing-room to relieve her feelings and repair damages, a scene was enacted in which the lady did the histrionics and the maid apologized and giggled alternately, until the one had exhausted her anthem of wrath and the other her accompaniment of penitence and giggles. Then a truce was patched up, which lasted for several days.
They have the quality that makes the histrionics of amateurs endurable; they are ladies and gentlemen; the worst, the wickedest of them, is a lady or gentleman behind the scene.
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