Her Faithful Knight — page 115: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Mr. Darcy’s Comedy Company. I1I she may be, will have my sincerest sympathy,” he ob- served enigmatically. “Tt wouldn’t be needed,” protested Darcy. “No man with a heart in his body can live without falling in love, and if he has much heart, he falls in love often. But once he meets a woman who is beautiful, refined, intellectual, virtuous, and devoted to him, he always falls in love with the same woman, and she is his wife.” “Here endeth the first lesson!’ Mr. Coles intoned with a yawn. “Tt won’t be Darcy’s first, or his twenty-first either,” Wyverley asserted. . | “The man who cannot love a beautiful woman isn’t worth knowing,” retorted Darcy. “Miss Knight’s figure alone would make a woman with a plain face beautiful. Every curve is perfection.” “Not enough flesh for me,’ Mr. Coles observed criti- cally, as he lit a cigarette. “Your tastes are coarse and earthy, Bobby. There is something poetic and ethereal about Dorothy Knight. But I’m aware that you cannot realize female loveliness which weighs anything under twelve stone. The mo- ment my eyes fell upon that charming girl’s face at Whit- lock’s office, I said to myself: “There sits the herojne for my play, Zara Carewe.’ ” “‘Let’s hope she’ll be able to act,” Jack Wyverley sug- gested. “It’s an awfully risky thing trusting a leading part to a beginner.” “What does it matter to me?” inquired the Hon: Darcy as he rolled himself a cigarette. “I was bound to give my play to the world to show how dramas should be written, and I was also bound to give myself the oppor- tunity of seeing that adorable girl daily. Let’s draw our chairs to the window and watch the passers-by.” “On the lookout for the fajr Dorothy, eh?” laughed Eomichbooks (E)