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Updated: June 5, 2025
"Otie darling," said Mrs Waddesleigh Peagrim, leaning her ample shoulder on Uncle Chris' perfectly fitting sleeve and speaking across him to young Mr Pilkington, "I do congratulate you, dear. It's perfectly delightful! I don't know when I have enjoyed a musical piece so much. Don't you think it's perfectly darling, Major Selby?"
She will make allowances for any ill-judged remarks you may have uttered in a moment of heat." Mr Pilkington brightened, and Mrs Peagrim, returning with a medicine-glass, was pleased to see him looking so much better. "You are a positive wizard, Major Selby," she said archly. "What have you been saying to the poor boy to cheer him up so? He has a bad headache this morning."
The fact that twenty-five years ago he had crushed in his arms beneath the shadows of the deodars a girl whose name he had forgotten, though he remembered that she had worn a dress of some pink stuff, was immaterial and irrelevant. Was he to crush Mrs Peagrim in his arms? Not, thought Uncle Chris to himself, on a bet.
Mr Pilkington did not use these actual words, but he reproduced the stricken infant's tone with great fidelity. "Notices! What are notices to me?" "Oh, don't be so affected!" cried Mrs Peagrim. "Don't pretend that you don't know every word of them by heart!" "I have not seen the notices, Aunt Olive," said Mr Pilkington dully. Mrs Peagrim looked at him with positive alarm.
"You were going to say something when that girl interrupted us." Uncle Chris shot his cuffs with a debonair gesture. "Was I? Was I? To be sure, yes. I was saying that you ought not to let yourself get tired. Deuce of a thing, getting tired. Plays the dickens with the system." Mrs Peagrim was disconcerted. The atmosphere seemed to have changed, and she did not like it.
How many of the best-known actresses in America began in that way! Dozens. Dozens. If I were giving advice to any young girl with theatrical aspirations, I should say 'Begin in the chorus! On the other hand," he proceeded, turning to Pilkington, "I think it would be just as well if you would not mention the fact of my niece being in that position to Mrs Waddesleigh Peagrim.
In addition to this, he had been woken up at seven o'clock, after going to sleep at three, by the ringing of the telephone and the announcement that a gentleman wished to see him: and he was weighed down with that heavy-eyed languor which comes to those whose night's rest is broken. "Why, how do you do, Mr Rooke!" said Mrs Peagrim.
He was just about to try again, when he caught his hostess' eye, and the soft gleam in it sent him cowering back into the silence as if he wore taking cover from an enemy's shrapnel. Mrs Peagrim touched him on the arm. "You were saying . . . ?" she murmured encouragingly. Uncle Chris shut his eyes. His fingers pressed desperately into the velvet curtain beside him.
"You wanted to speak to me?" said Uncle Chris, bounding up. "Certainly, certainly, certainly, of course. If you will excuse me for a moment?" Mrs Peagrim bowed coldly. The interruption had annoyed her. She had no notion who Jill was, and she resented the intrusion at this particular juncture intensely. Not so Uncle Chris, who skipped out into the passage like a young lamb.
But then," said Mrs Peagrim in extenuation, "I had only seen the piece when it was done at my house at Newport, and of course it really was rather dreadful nonsense then! I might have known that you would change it a great deal before you put it on in New York. As I always say, plays are not written, they are rewritten! Why, you have improved this piece a hundred per cent, Otie!
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