Paul waved the dreaded houris away as though they were midges.  “I’m sick of girls,” he replied in a tone of such sincerity that Jane tossed her head.

“Oh?  Then I suppose you lump me with the rest and are sick of me too?”

“Don’t worry a fellow,” said Paul.  “You’re not a girl-not in that sense, I mean.  You’re a pal.”

“Anyway, they’re lots prettier than what I am,” she said defiantly.

He looked at her critically, after the brutal manner of obtuse boyhood, and beheld an object quite agreeable to the sight.  Her Londoner’s ordinarily colourless checks were flushed, her blue eyes shone bright, her little chin was in the air and her parted lips showed a flash of white teeth.  She wore a neat simple blouse and skirt and held her slim, half-developed figure taut.  Paul shook his head.  “Jolly few of them—­without grease-paint on.”

“But you see them all painted up.”

He burst into laughter.  “Then they’re beastly, near by!  You silly kid, don’t you know?  We’ve got to make up, otherwise no one in front would be able to see our mouths and noses and eyes.  From the front we look lovely; but close to we’re horrors.”

“Well, how should I know that?” asked Jane.

“You couldn’t unless you saw us—­or were told.  But now you know.”

“Do you look beastly too?”

“Vile,” he laughed.

“I’m glad I didn’t think of going on the stage,"’ she said, childish yet very feminine unreason combining with atavistic puritanism.  “I shouldn’t like to paint my face.”

“You get used to it,” said Paul, the experienced.

“I think it horrid to paint your face.”

He swung to the door—­they were in the little parlour behind the shop—­a flash of anger in his eyes.  “If you think everything I do horrid, I can’t talk to you.”

He marched out.  Jane suddenly realized that she had behaved badly.  She whipped herself.  She had behaved atrociously.  Of course she had been jealous of the theatre girls; but had he not been proving to her all the time in what small account he held them?  And now he had gone.  At seventeen a beloved gone for an hour is a beloved gone for ever.  She rushed to the foot of the stairs on which his ascending steps still creaked.

“Paul!”

“Yes.”

“Come back!  Do come back!”

Paul came back and followed her into the parlour.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He graciously forgave her, having already arrived at the mature conclusion that females were unaccountable folk whose excursions into unreason should be regarded by man with pitying indulgence.  And, in spite of the seriousness with which he took himself, he was a sunny-tempered youth.

Barney Bill, putting into the Port of London, so to speak, in order to take in cargo, also visited the theatre towards the end of the run of the piece.  He waited, by arrangement, for Paul outside the stage door, and Paul, coming out, linked arms and took him to a blazing bar in Piccadilly Circus and ministered to his thirst, with a princely air.