“No thank you, I will not take you out of your way. Go home at once and get rested, and come and see me one of these days; don't forget.” Lady Seveley smiled, but Frank felt that she was annoyed.
“I wonder if she wanted me to go home with her. That impertinent brute Fletcher daring to come up to speak to us! I was very nearly telling him to go and fetch the carriage.”
He pushed open the swinging doors with violence, nearly upsetting the fat porter. The bar was nearly empty, and he found Lizzie disengaged.
“You look very vexed. Has any one been pinching you?”
“What will you have to put you straight?”
“Well, that is a question. Let me see. I don't care about another brandy and soda, and if I have coffee it may keep me awake.”
“Very well.” He hesitated, but the inclination to speak soon overpowered him. “I call it bad form, when you are with a lady for another fellow to come up and speak to her.”
“Of course he knew her, but that doesn't give him a right to come up and enter into a long conversation when I am with her. I wish I had knocked him down.”
“I should have had to take my chance of that. In London people don't seem to me to mind whom they speak to--a low-bred Irishman, who never spoke to a lady until he left his own country.”
“No, I am not in a rage,” said Frank, who at that moment felt the folly of these confidences. “I don't care a hang. It isn't as if it were a woman I cared about. Had it been you--”
“I assure you I speak only in a general way, and you must admit that if you go out with a fellow it would not be nice of you to begin talking to some one else.”
“There, then you admit I was right, I was sure you would; I don't care a hang for the lady I was with, but I don't intend to allow any one to insult me. But I wonder how you can speak to soldiers.”
“They are no worse than the others. Besides, in our business we have to be polite to every one.”
“Polite, yes--but I wanted to speak to you, I came down from my box on purpose to speak to you, and I couldn't, you were so engaged with that soldier.”
“He was here before you; you would not like it if you were talking to me, and I were to rush off to speak to some one else.”
“One Scotch and three Irish, miss, and out of the bottle please, our friend here's most particular, he would like it in a thin glass, too--wouldn't you, Ted? and if he could have a go at that pretty mouth he would like it better still. A rare one after the ladies is Teddy. Aren't you, old chap?”