Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/87

 culture, and the search for safe investments. He was not married. Fanny Widgen had been an unattainable ideal of his days behind the counter, and he still felt romantic about her. He did not say so. He did not need to. She knew it from his manner of recalling her and her pony and the sight of her driving past the blue and crimson bottles of the druggist's window in her dog-cart.

She explained, then, about the star, laughing unblushingly. "I didn't want to give him back the scene, and I didn't want to talk to him about it. I couldn't say I wouldn't, you know. That would have made too much trouble. So I let him think you had been annoying me. I hadn't recognized you, of course. I knew I could escape if he'd only start a row. And he'd boasted so much about 'beating up' waiters and elevator-men that I thought he'd jump at the opportunity to make a hero of himself for me. Did you hurt him?"

"I don't think so," he said, modestly. "Not much. I may have blacked one of his eyes." "Blacked his eye!"

"They must have been all elevator-boys that he'd been beating up."

"He probably never fought any one in his life before," she said. And she added, reflectively, "Blacked his eye!"

That was serious. It was serious for everybody—the producer, the author, the whole company.