"If you please, Mr. Machin--"
He turned. It was his typewriter, Miss Lindop, a young girl of some
thirty-five years, holding a tea-tray.
"But I've had my tea once!" he snapped.
"But you've not had your dinner, sir, and it's half-past eight!" she
pleaded.
He had known this girl for less than a month, and he paid her fewer
shillings a week than the years of her age--and yet somehow she had
assumed a worshipping charge of him, based on the idea that he was
incapable of taking care of himself. To look at her appealing eyes one
might have thought that she would have died to ensure his welfare.
"And they want to see you about the linoleum for the gallery stairs,"
she added timidly. "The County Council man says it must be taken up."
The linoleum for the gallery stairs! Something snapped in him. He
almost walked right through the young woman and the tea-tray.
"I'll linoleum them!" he bitterly exclaimed, and disappeared.
II
Having duly "linoleumed them," or rather having very annoyingly quite
failed to "linoleum them," Edward Henry continued his way up the
right-hand gallery staircase, and reached the auditorium, where to his
astonishment a good deal of electricity, at one penny three farthings
a unit, was blazing. Every seat in the narrow and high-pitched
gallery, where at the sides the knees of one spectator would be on a
level with the picture-hat of the spectator in the row beneath, had
a perfect and entire view of the proscenium opening.
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