the apartment like thieves. And then Martin took the pins out of her
little once-white hat, drew her coat off, picked her up as if she
were a child and put her on the sofa.

"There you are, Tootles," he said, without aggressive cheerfulness,
but still cheerful. "You lie there, young 'un, and I'll get you
something to eat. It's nearly a day since you saw food."

And after a little while, humanized by the honest kindness of this
obvious man, she sat up and leaned on an elbow and watched him
through the gap in the curtains that hid her domestic arrangements.
He was scrambling some eggs. He had made a pile of chicken
sandwiches and laid the table. He had put some flowers that he had
brought for her earlier in the evening in the middle of it, stuck
into an empty milk bottle. In her excitement and joy about the play,
she had forgotten to put them in water. They were distinctly sad.

"Me word!" she said to herself, through the aftermath of her
emotion. "That's some boy. Gee, that's some good boy." Even her
thoughts were conducted in a mixture of Brixton and Broadway.

"Now, then," he said, "all ready, marm," and put his handiwork in
what he hoped was an appetizing manner on the table. The hot eggs
were on a cold plate, but did that really matter?

Not to Tootles, who was glad to get anything, anyhow. That room was
the Ritz Hotel in comparison with the slatterly tenement in which
she had won through the first unsoaped years of a sordid life. And
Martin--well, Martin was something out of a fairy tale.