"I' faith!" replied the second, a painted minx, like her friend, with half a score of patches on her face--"pretty enough, but too much like a girl. For my part, I prefer to look upon a man. Now, Roddy, here, hath none too much beauty yet enough, or will have when he is a man."
"When he is a man!" my cousin said, "when he is a man, indeed! Man enough any way to find the wherewithal for giving you a good supper, Mistress Doll, which it strikes me you would not get from your wages nor from any of your 'manly' actors who strut about the booths with you, nor from the half-starved looking playwrights I have seen lurking about the theatre doors."
"There! there! Roddy!" said the one who had spoken last, swallowing his abuse as best she might, "there, there! Take no offence where none is meant, and, for the supper, 'tis most excellent. Yet the claret runs low, my lad, and I am thirsty."
"Thirsty!" the gracious Roderick replied; "that you are always, Doll, like all your crew. But claret is useless to such as thee! Here, drawer, waiter, come here. Bring us some of the brandy punch that Macarthy knows so well how to brew, and quick--dost hear?"
"The score, sir," I heard the man whisper, "is large already. And I have to account to the master----"
"The devil take you, and the score, and your master, too! Is not my father the Honourable Viscount St. Amande, thou rogue, and can he not pay for all the liquor I drink as well as what my friends consume? Go, fetch it, I say."
Meanwhile I sat in my box sipping a small measure of claret--which stuff I wondered some could be found to approve so much of--and regarding sideways the others. The punch being brought, my cousin, with a lordly air, bade the other young man ladle it out, telling him coarsely to keep the glasses of the girls well filled, since they were capable of drinking the Liffey dry if 'twere full of liquor; and the women, taking no notice of these remarks, to which and similar ones they were probably well used, fell to discussing some play in which they were shortly to appear.
"The lines are fair enough," said the elder of the two, whom Roderick had fallen foul of, to the other; "yet there are too many of them, and the action halts. Moreover, as for plot--why, there's none."