"
"And your address--let me have your address----"
He breathed deeply in the open air. Glancing back at the house when
he had crossed the street, he saw a white hand waved to him at a
window; it hurried his step.
On the following day, Mrs. Florio visited her friend Miss
Bonnicastle, who had some time since exchanged the old quarters in
Great Portland Street for a house in Pimlico, where there was a
larger studio (workshop, as she preferred to call it), hung about
with her own and other people's designs. The artist of the poster
was full as ever of vitality and of good-nature, but her humour had
not quite the old spice; a stickler for decorum would have said that
she was decidedly improved, that she had grown more womanly; and
something of this change appeared also in her work, which tended now
to the graceful rather than the grotesque. She received her
fashionable visitant with off-hand friendliness, not altogether with
cordiality.
"Oh, I've something to show you. Do you know that name?"
Olga took a business-card, and read upon it: "Alexander Otway,
Dramatic & Musical Agent."
"It's his brother," she said, in a voice of quiet surprise.
"I thought so. The man called yesterday--wants a fetching thing to
boom an Irish girl at the halls. There's her photo."
It represented a piquant person in short skirts; a face neither very
pretty nor very young, but likely to be deemed attractive by the
public in question.
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