Tipping the Velvet Read Online Free PDF Page B

to, I think, when the clatter of the hall pierced the crowd, but softly, almost secretly, as if she might hear my brain at last, and made me look about me and see the me the better if I whispered rather than bawled.
    inquisitive, indulgent looks that were turned my way, and And perhaps, after all, she did. I had thought that, when she the nods and the chuckles and the winks that met my up-walked on to the stage, she had glanced my way - as much turned gaze. I reddened, and shrank back into the shadows as to say, the box is filled again. Now, as she wheeled of the box. With my back turned to the bank of prying eyes before the footlights, I thought I saw her look at me again.
    I slipped the rose into the belt of my dress, and pulled on The idea was a fantastic one - and yet every time her gaze my gloves. My heart, which had begun to pound when Miss swept the crowded hall it seemed to brush my own, and Butler had stepped towards me across the stage, was still 29

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    beating painfully hard; but as I left my box and made my that you like her,' he said simply. 'Now will you come way towards the crowded foyer and the street beyond, it along, or what?'
    began to feel light, and glad, and I began to want to smile. I I did not know what to say. So I said nothing, but let him had to place a hand before my lips so as not to appear an lead me away from the great glass doors with the blue, cool, idiot, smiling to myself as if at nothing.
    Canterbury night behind them, past the archway that led to Just as I was about to step into the street, I heard my name the stalls, and the staircase to the gallery, towards an alcove called. I turned, and saw Tony, crossing the lobby with his in the far corner of the foyer, with a curtain across it, and a arm raised to catch my eye. It was a relief to have a friend, rope before it, and a sign swinging from the rope, marked at last, to smile at. I took the hand away, and grinned like a Private.
    monkey.

    'Hey, hey,' he said breathlessly when he reached my side, Chapter 2
    'someone's merry, and I know why! How come girls never I had been back stage at the Palace with Tony once or twice look so gay as that, when / give them roses?' I blushed before, but only in the daytime, when the hall was dim and again, and returned my fingers to my lips, but said nothing.
    quite deserted. Now the corridors along which I walked Tony smirked.
    with him were full of light and noise. We passed one
    'I've got a message for you,' he said then. 'Someone to see doorway that led, I knew, to the stage itself: I caught a you.' I raised my eyebrows; I thought perhaps Alice or glimpse of ladders and ropes and trailing gas-pipes; of boys Freddy were here, come to meet me. Tony's smirk in caps and aprons, wheeling baskets, manoeuvring lights. I broadened. 'Miss Butler,' he said, 'would like a word.'
    had the sensation then - and I felt it again in the years that My own grin faded at once. 'A word?' I said. 'Miss Butler?
    followed, every time I made a similar trip back stage - that I With me?'
    had stepped into the workings of a giant clock, stepped That's right. She asked Ike, the fly-man, who was the girl through the elegant casing to the dusty, greasy, restless that sat in the box every night, on her own, and Ike said you machinery that lay, all hidden from the common eye, was a pal of mine, and to ask me. So she did. And I told behind it.
    her. And now she wants to see you.'
    Tony led me down a passageway that stopped at a metal
    'What for? Oh, Tony, what on earth for? What did you tell staircase, and here he paused to let three men go by. They her?' I caught hold of his arm and gripped it hard.
    wore hats and carried overcoats and bags; they were sallow-
    'Nothing, except the truth -' I gave his arm a twist. The truth faced and poor-looking, with a patina of flashness - I was terrible. I didn't want her to know about the shivering thought they might be salesmen carrying sample-cases.
    and the whispering, the flame and the