"Nelly Bryant? I know her."
"Yes? Fancy that! She was in a thing called 'Follow the Girl' in London. Did you see it by any chance? Topping show! There was one scene where the …"
"Get on! Get on! I wrote it,"
"You wrote it?" Freddie beamed simple-hearted admiration. "My dear old chap, I congratulate you! One of the ripest and most all-wool musical comedies I've ever seen. I went twenty-four times. Rummy I don't remember spotting that you wrote it. I suppose one never looks at the names on the programme. Yes, I went twenty-four times. The first time I went was with a couple of chappies from …"
"Listen, Freddie!" said Wally feverishly. "On some other occasion I should dearly love to hear the story of your life, but just now …"
"Absolutely, old man. You're perfectly right. Well, to cut a long story short, Nelly Bryant told me that she and Jill were rehearsing with a piece called 'The Rose of America.'"
"'The Rose of America!'"
"I think that was the name of it."
"That's Ike Goble's show. He called me up on the phone about it half an hour ago. I promised to go and see a rehearsal of it tomorrow or the day after. And Jill's in that?"
"Yes. How about it? I mean, I don't know much about this sort of thing, but do you think it's the sort of thing Jill ought to be doing?"
Wally was moving restlessly about the room. Freddie's news had disquieted him. Mr Goble had a reputation.
"I know a lot about it," he replied, "and it certainly isn't." He scowled at the carpet.
Freddie paused to allow him to proceed, if such should be his wish, but Wally had apparently said his say. Freddie went on to point out an aspect of the matter which was troubling him greatly.
"I'm sure poor old Derek wouldn't like her being in the chorus!"
Wally started so violently that for a moment Freddie was uneasy.
"I mean Underhill," he corrected himself hastily.
"Freddie," said Wally, "you're an awfully good chap, but I wish you would exit rapidly now! Thanks for coming and telling me, very good of you. This way out!"
"But, old man … !"
"Now what?"
"I thought we were going to discuss this binge and decide what to do and all that sort of thing."
"Some other time. I want to think about it."
"Oh, you will think about it?"
"Yes, I'll think about it."
"Topping!
"I probably shall, if you don't go."
"Eh? Oh, ah, yes!" Freddie struggled into his coat.  "Well, cheerio!"
"Same to you!"
"You'll let me know if you scare up some devilish fruity wheeze, won't you? I'm at the Biltmore."
"Very good place to be.
"Right ho! Well, toodle-oo!"
"The elevator is at the foot of the stairs," said Wally. "You press the bell and up it comes. You hop in and down you go. It's a great invention! Good night!"
"Oh, I say. One moment …"
"Good night!" said Wally.
He closed the door, and ran down the passage.
"Jill!" he called. He opened the bedroom window and stepped out. "Jill!"
There was no reply.
"Jill!" called Wally once again, but again there was no answer.
Wally walked to the parapet, and looked over. Below him the vastness of the city stretched itself in a great triangle, its apex the harbor, its sides the dull silver of the East and Hudson rivers. Directly before him, crowned with its white lantern, the Metropolitan Tower reared its graceful height to the stars. And all around, in the windows of the tall buildings that looked from this bastion on which he stood almost squat, a million lights stared up at him, the unsleeping eyes of New York. It was a scene of which Wally, always sensitive to beauty, never tired: but tonight it had lost its appeal. A pleasant breeze from the Jersey shore greeted him with a quickening whisper of springtime and romance, but it did not lift the heaviness of his heart. He felt depressed and apprehensive.
Spring, whose coming the breeze had heralded to Wally as he smoked upon the roof, floated graciously upon New York two mornings later. The city awoke to a day of blue and gold and to a sense of hard times over and good times to come. In a million homes, a million young men thought of sunny afternoons at the Polo Grounds; a million young women of long summer Sundays by the crowded waves of Coney Island. In his apartment on Park Avenue, Mr Isaac Goble, sniffing the gentle air from the window of his breakfast-room, returned to his meal and his Morning Telegraph with a resolve to walk to the theatre for rehearsal: a resolve which had also come to Jill and Nelly Bryant, eating stewed prunes in their boarding-house in the Forties. On the summit of his sky-scraper, Wally Mason, performing Swedish exercises to the delectation of various clerks and stenographers in the upper windows of neighboring buildings, felt young and vigorous and optimistic; and went in to his shower-bath thinking of Jill. And it was of Jill, too, that young Mr Pilkington thought, as he propped his long form up against the pillows and sipped his morning cup of tea. He had not yet had an opportunity of inspecting the day for himself, but his Japanese valet, who had been round the corner for papers, had spoken well of it; and even in his bedroom the sunlight falling on the carpet gave some indication of what might be expected outside. For the first time in several days a certain moodiness which had affected Otis Pilkington left him, and he dreamed happy daydreams.
The gaiety of Otis was not, however, entirely or even primarily due to the improvement in the weather. It had its source in a conversation which had taken place between himself and Jill's Uncle Chris on the previous night. Exactly how it had come about, Mr Pilkington was not entirely clear, but, somehow, before he was fully aware of what he was saying, he had begun to pour into Major Selby's sympathetic ears the story of his romance. Encouraged by the other's kindly receptiveness, he had told him all—his love for Jill, his hopes that some day it might be returned, the difficulties complicating the situation owing to the known prejudices of Mrs Waddesleigh Peagrim concerning girls who formed the personnel of musical comedy ensembles. To all these outpourings Major Selby had listened with keen attention, and finally had made one of those luminous suggestions, so simple yet so shrewd, which emanate only from your man of the world. It was Jill's girlish ambition, it seemed from Major Selby's statement, to become a force in the motion-picture world. The movies were her objective. When she had told him of this, said Uncle Chris, he had urged her, speaking in her best interests, to gain experience by joining in the humblest capacity the company of some good musical play, where she could learn from the best masters so much of the technique of the business. That done, she could go about her life-work, fortified and competent.
What, he broke off to ask, did Pilkington think of the idea?
Pilkington thought the idea splendid. Miss Mariner, with her charm and looks, would be wonderful in the movies.
There was, said Uncle Chris, a future for a girl in the movies.
Mr Pilkington agreed cordially. A great future.
"Look at Mary Pickford!" said Uncle Chris. "Millions a year!"
Mr Pilkington contemplated Miss Pickford, and agreed again. He instanced other stars—lesser luminaries, perhaps, but each with her thousands a week. There was no doubt about it—a girl's best friend was the movies.
"Observe," proceeded Uncle Chris, gathering speed and expanding his chest as he spread his legs before the fire, "how it would simplify the whole matter if Jill were to become a motion-picture artist and win fame and wealth in her profession. And there can be no reasonable doubt, my boy, that she would. As you say, with her appearance and her charm … Which of these women whose names you see all along Broadway in electric lights can hold a candle to her? Once started, with the proper backing behind her, her future would be assured. And then. … Of course, as regards her feelings I cannot speak, as I know nothing of them, but we will assume that she is not indifferent to you … what then? You go to your excellent aunt and announce that you are engaged to be married to Jill Mariner. There is a momentary pause. 'Not the Jill Mariner?' falters Mrs Peagrim. 'Yes, the famous Miss Mariner!' you reply. Well, I ask you, my boy, can you see her making an objection? Such a thing would be absurd. No, I can se no flaw in the project whatsoever." Here Uncle Chris, as he had pictured Mrs Peagrim doing, paused for a moment. "Of course, there would be the preliminaries."
"The preliminaries?"
Uncle Chris' voice became a melodious coo. He beamed upon Mr Pilkington.
"Well, think for yourself, my boy! These things cannot be done without money. I do not propose to allow my niece to waste her time and her energy in the rank and file of the profession, waiting years for a chance that might never come. There is plenty of room at the top, and that, in the motion-picture profession, is the place to start. If Jill is to become a motion-picture artist, a special company must be formed to promote her. She must be made a feature, a star, from the beginning. That is why I have advised her to accept her present position temporarily, in order that she may gain experience. She must learn to walk before she runs. She must study before she soars. But when the moment arrives for her to take the step, she must not be hampered by lack of money. Whether," said Uncle Chris, smoothing the crease of his trousers, "you would wish to take shares in the company yourself …"
"Oo … !"
 Possibly you have other claims on your purse.  Possibly you may consider the venture too speculative. Possibly … there are a hundred reasons why you may not wish to join us. But I know a dozen men—I can go down Wall Street tomorrow and pick out twenty men—who will be glad to advance the necessary capital. I can assure you that I personally shall not hesitate to risk—if one can call it risking—any loose cash which I may have lying idle at my banker's."
 Mr Pilkington was thus enabled to insert a word.
"How much would you want?" he enquired.
"That," said Uncle Chris meditatively, "is a little hard to say. I should have to look into the matter more closely in order to give you the exact figures. But let us say for the sake of argument that you put up—what shall we say?—a hundred thousand? fifty thousand?… no, we will be conservative. Perhaps you had better not begin with more than ten thousand. You can always buy more shares later. I don't suppose I shall begin with more than ten thousand myself."
"I could manage ten thousand all right."
"Excellent. We make progress, we make progress. Very well, then. I go to my Wall Street friends—I would give you their names, only for the present, till something definite has been done, that would hardly be politic—I go to my Wall Street friends, and tell them about the scheme, and say 'Here is ten thousand dollars! What is your contribution?' It puts the affair on a business-like basis, you understand. Then we really get to work. But use your own judgment my boy, you know. Use your own judgment. I would not think of persuading you to take such a step, if you felt at all doubtful. Think it over. Sleep on it.  It would be cruel to raise her hopes until we are certain that we are in a position to enable her to realize them. And, of course, not a word to Mrs Peagrim."
"Of course."
"Very well, then, my boy." said Uncle Chris affably. "I will leave you to turn the whole thing over in your mind. Act entirely as you think best. How is your insomnia, by the way? Did you try Nervino? Capital! There's nothing like it. It did wonders for me! Good-night, good-night!"
Otis Pilkington had been turning the thing over in his mind, with an interval for sleep, ever since. And the more he thought of it, the better the scheme appeared to him. He winced a little at the thought of the ten thousand dollars, for he came of prudent stock and had been brought up in habits of parsimony, but, after all, he reflected, the money would be merely a loan. Once the company found its feet, it would be returned to him a hundred-fold. And there was no doubt that this would put a completely different aspect on his wooing of Jill, as far as his Aunt Olive was concerned. Why, a cousin of his—young Brewster Philmore—had married a movie-star only two years ago, and nobody had made the slightest objection. Brewster was to be seen with his bride frequently beneath Mrs Peagrim's roof. Against the higher strata of Bohemia Mrs Peagrim had no prejudice at all. Quite the reverse, in fact. She liked the society of those whose names were often in the papers and much in the public mouth. It seemed to Otis Pilkington, in short, that Love had found a way. He sipped his tea with relish, and when the Japanese valet brought in the toast all burned on one side, chided him with a gentle sweetness which, one may hope, touched the latter's Oriental heart and inspired him with a desire to serve this best of employers more efficiently.
At half-past ten, Otis Pilkington removed his dressing-gown and began to put on his clothes to visit the theatre. There was a rehearsal-call for the whole company at eleven. As he dressed, his mood was as sunny as the day itself.
And the day, by half-past ten, was as sunny as ever Spring day had been in a country where Spring comes early and does its best from the very start, The blue sky beamed down on a happy city. To and fro the citizenry bustled, aglow with the perfection of the weather. Everywhere was gaiety and good cheer, except on the stage of the Gotham Theatre, where an early rehearsal, preliminary to the main event, had been called by Johnson Miller in order to iron some of the kinks out of the "My Heart and I" number, which, with the assistance of the male chorus, the leading lady was to render in act one.
On the stage of the Gotham gloom reigned—literally, because the stage was wide and deep and was illumined only by a single electric light: and figuratively, because things were going even worse than usual with the "My Heart and I" number, and Johnson Miller, always of an emotional and easily stirred temperament, had been goaded by the incompetence of his male chorus to a state of frenzy. At about the moment when Otis Pilkington shed his flowered dressing-gown and reached for his trousers (the heather-mixture with the red twill), Johnson Miller was pacing the gangway between the orchestra pit and the first row of the orchestra chairs, waving one hand and clutching his white locks with the other, his voice raised the while in agonized protest.
  You don't seem able to turn without tumbling over each other like a lot of Keystone Kops! What's the matter with you? You're not doing the movements I showed you; you're doing some you have invented yourselves, and they are rotten! I've no doubt you think you can arrange a number better than I can, but Mr Goble engaged me to be the director, so kindly do exactly as I tell you. Don't try to use your own intelligence, because you haven't any. I'm not blaming you for it.  But it handicaps you when you try to think."
Of the seven gentlemanly members of the male ensemble present, six looked wounded by this tirade. They had the air of good men wrongfully accused. They appeared to be silently calling on Heaven to see justice done between Mr. Miller and themselves. The seventh, a long-legged young man in faultlessly-fitting tweeds of English cut, seemed, on the other hand, not so much hurt as embarrassed. It was this youth who now stepped down to the darkened footlights and spoke in a remorseful and conscience-stricken manner.
"I say!"
Mr Miller, that martyr to deafness, did not hear the pathetic bleat. He had swung off at right angles and was marching in an overwrought way up the central aisle leading to the back of the house, his india rubber form moving in convulsive jerks. Only when he had turned and retraced his steps did he perceive the speaker and prepare to take his share in the conversation.
"What?" he shouted. "Can't hear you!"
"I say, you know, it's my fault, really."
"What?"
"I mean to say, you know …"
"What? Speak up, can't you?"
Mr Saltzburg, who had been seated at the piano, absently playing a melody from his unproduced musical comedy, awoke to the fact that the services of an interpreter were needed. He obligingly left the music-stool and crept, crablike, along the ledge of the stage-box. He placed his arm about Mr Miller's shoulders and his lips to Mr Miller's left ear, and drew a deep breath.
"He says it is his fault!"
Mr Miller nodded adhesion to this admirable sentiment.
"I know they're not worth their salt!" he replied.
Mr Saltzburg patiently took in a fresh stock of breath.
"This young man says it is his fault that the movement went wrong!"
"Tell him I only signed on this morning, laddie," urged the tweed-clad young man.
"He only joined the company this morning!"
This puzzled Mr Miller.
"How do you mean, warning?" he asked.
Mr Saltzburg, purple in the face, made a last effort.
"This young man is new," he bellowed carefully, keeping to words of one syllable. "He does not yet know the steps. He says this is his first day here, so he does not yet know the steps. When he has been here some more time he will know the steps. But now he does not know the steps."
"What he means," explained the young man in tweeds helpfully, "is that I don't know the steps."
"He does not know the steps!" roared Mr Saltzburg.
"I know he doesn't know the steps," said Mr Miller. "Why doesn't he know the steps? He's had long enough to learn them."
"He is new!"
"Hugh?"
"New!"
"Oh, new?"
"Yes, new!"
 cried Mr Miller, awaking suddenly to the truth and filled with a sense of outrage. "Why didn't he join with the rest of the company? How can I put on chorus numbers if I am saddled every day with new people to teach? Who engaged him?"
"Who engaged you?" enquired Mr Saltzburg of the culprit.
"Mr Pilkington."
"Mr Pilkington," shouted Mr Saltzburg.
"When?"
"When?"
"Last night."
"Last night."
Mr Miller waved his hands in a gesture of divine despair, spun round, darted up the aisle, turned, and bounded back. "What can I do?" he wailed. "My hands are tied! I am hampered! I am handicapped! We open in two weeks, and every day I find somebody new in the company to upset everything I have done. I shall go to Mr Goble and ask to be released from my contract. I shall … Come along, come along, come along now!" he broke off suddenly. "Why are we wasting time? The whole number once more. The whole number once more from the beginning!"
The young man tottered back to his gentlemanly colleagues, running a finger in an agitated manner round the inside of his collar. He was not used to this sort of thing. In a large experience of amateur theatricals he had never encountered anything like it. In the breathing-space afforded by the singing of the first verse and refrain by the lady who played the heroine of "The Rose of America," he found time to make an enquiry of the artist on his right.
"I say! Is he always like this?"
"Who? Johnny?"
"The sportsman with the hair that turned white in a single night. The barker on the skyline. Does he often get the wind up like this?"
His colleague smiled tolerantly.
"Why, that's nothing!" he replied. "Wait till you see him really cut loose! That was just a gentle whisper!"
"My God!" said the newcomer, staring into a bleak future. The leading lady came to the end of her refrain, and the gentlemen of the ensemble, who had been hanging about up-stage, began to curvet nimbly down towards her in a double line; the new arrival, with an eye on his nearest neighbor, endeavouring to curvet as nimbly as the others. A clapping of hands from the dark auditorium indicated—inappropriately— that he had failed to do so. Mr Miller could be perceived—dimly— with all his fingers entwined in his hair.
"Clear the stage!" yelled Mr Miller. "Not you!" he shouted, as the latest addition to the company began to drift off with the others. "You stay!"
"Me?"
"Yes, you. I shall have to teach you the steps by yourself, or we shall get nowhere. Go on-stage. Start the music again, Mr Saltzburg. Now, when the refrain begins, come down. Gracefully! Gracefully!"
The young man, pink but determined, began to come down gracefully. And it was while he was thus occupied that Jill and Nelly Bryant, entering the wings which were beginning to fill up as eleven o'clock approached, saw him.
"Whoever is that?" said Nelly.
"New man," replied one of the chorus gentlemen. "Came this morning."
Nelly turned to Jill.
"He looks just like Mr Rooke!" she exclaimed.
"He is Mr Rooke!" said Jill.
"He can't be!"
"He is!"
"But what is he doing here?"
Jill bit her lip.
"That's just what I'm going to ask him myself," she said.
The opportunity for a private conversation with Freddie did not occur immediately. For ten minutes he remained alone on the stage, absorbing abusive tuition from Mr Miller: and at the end of that period a further ten minutes was occupied with the rehearsing of the number with the leading lady and the rest of the male chorus. When, finally, a roar from the back of the auditorium announced the arrival of Mr Goble and at the same time indicated Mr Goble's desire that the stage should be cleared and the rehearsal proper begin, a wan smile of recognition and a faint "What ho!" was all that Freddie was able to bestow upon Jill, before, with the rest of the ensemble, they had to go out and group themselves for the opening chorus. It was only when this had been run through four times and the stage left vacant for two of the principals to play a scene that Jill was able to draw the Last of the Rookes aside in a dark corner and put him to the question.
"Freddie, what are you doing here?"
Freddie mopped his streaming brow. Johnson Miller's idea of an opening chorus was always strenuous. On the present occasion, the ensemble were supposed to be guests at a Long Island house-party, and Mr Miller's conception of the gathering suggested that he supposed house-party guests on Long Island to consist exclusively of victims of St Vitus' dance. Freddie was feeling limp, battered, and. exhausted: and, from what he had gathered, the worst was yet to come.
"Eh?" he said feebly.
"What are you doing here?"
"Oh, ah, yes! I see what you mean! I suppose you're surprised to find me in New York, what?"
"I'm not surprised to find you in New York. I knew you had come over. But I am surprised to find you on the stage, being bullied by Mr Miller."
"I say," said Freddie in an awed voice. "He's a bit of a nut, that lad, what! He reminds me of the troops of Midian in the hymn. The chappies who prowled and prowled around. I'll bet he's worn a groove in the carpet. Like a jolly old tiger at the Zoo at feeding time. Wouldn't be surprised at any moment to look down and find him biting a piece out of my leg!"
Jill seized his arm and shook it.
"Don't ramble, Freddie! Tell me how you got here."
"Oh, that was pretty simple. I had a letter of introduction to this chappie Pilkington who's running this show, and, we having got tolerably pally in the last few days, I went to him and asked him to let me join the merry throng. I said I didn't want any money and the little bit of work I would do wouldn't make any difference, so he said 'Right ho!' or words to that effect, and here I am."
"But why? You can't be doing this for fun, surely?"
"Fun!" A pained expression came into Freddie's face. "My idea of fun isn't anything in which jolly old Miller, the bird with the snowy hair, is permitted to mix. Something tells me that that lad is going to make it his life-work picking on me.  I had a talk with Wally Mason the night before last, and he seemed to think that being in the chorus wasn't the sort of thing you ought to be doing, so I thought it over and decided that I ought to join the troupe too. Then I could always be on the spot, don't you know, if there was any trouble. I mean to say, I'm not much of a chap and all that sort of thing, but still I might come in handy one of these times. Keep a fatherly eye on you, don't you know, and what not!"
Jill was touched.
"You're a dear, Freddie!"
"I thought, don't you know, it would make poor old Derek a bit easier in his mind."
Jill froze.
"I don't want to talk about Derek, Freddie, please."
"Oh, I know what you must be feeling. Pretty sick, I'll bet, what? But if you could see him now …"
"I don't want to talk about him!"
"He's pretty cut up, you know. Regrets bitterly and all that sort of thing. He wants you to come back again."
"I see! He sent you to fetch me?"
"That was more or less the idea."
"It's a shame that you had all the trouble. You can get messenger-boys to go anywhere and do anything nowadays. Derek ought to have thought of that."
Freddie looked at her doubtfully.
"You're spoofing, aren't you? I mean to say, you wouldn't have liked that!"
"I shouldn't have disliked it any more than his sending you."
"Oh, but I wanted to pop over. Keen to see America and so forth."
Jill looked past him at the gloomy stage. Her face was set, and her eyes sombre.
"Can't you understand, Freddie? You've known me a long time. I should have thought that you would have found out by now that I have a certain amount of pride. If Derek wanted me back, there was only one thing for him to do—come over and find me himself."
"Rummy! That's what Mason said, when I told him. You two don't realize how dashed busy Derek is these days."
"Busy!"
Something in her face seemed to tell Freddie that he was not saying the right thing, but he stumbled on.
"You've no notion how busy he is. I mean to say, elections coming on and so forth. He daren't stir from the metrop."
"Of course I couldn't expect him to do anything that might interfere with his career, could I?"
"Absolutely not. I knew you would see it!" said Freddie, charmed at her reasonableness. All rot, what you read about women being unreasonable. "Then I take it it's all right, eh?"
"All right?"
"I mean you will toddle home with me at the earliest opp. and make poor old Derek happy?"
Jill laughed discordantly.
"Poor old Derek!" she echoed. "He has been badly treated, hasn't he?"
"Well, I wouldn't say that," said Freddie doubtfully. "You see, coming down to it, the thing was more or less his fault, what?"
"More or less!"
"I mean to say …"
"More or less!"
Freddie glanced at her anxiously. He was not at all sure now that he liked the way she was looking or the tone in which she spoke. He was not a keenly observant young man, but there did begin at this point to seep through to his brain-centers a suspicion that all was not well.
"Let me pull myself together!" said Freddie warily to his immortal soul. "I believe I'm getting the raspberry!" And there was silence for a space.
The complexity of life began to weigh upon Freddie. Life was like one of those shots at squash which seem so simple till you go to knock the cover off the ball, when the ball sort of edges away from you and you miss it. Life, Freddie began to perceive, was apt to have a nasty back-spin on it. He had never had any doubt when he had started, that the only difficult part of his expedition to America would be the finding of Jill. Once found, he had presumed that she would be delighted to hear his good news and would joyfully accompany him home on the next boat. It appeared now, however, that he had been too sanguine. Optimist as he was, he had to admit that, as far as could be ascertained with the naked eye, the jolly old binge might be said to have sprung a leak.
He proceeded to approach the matter from another angle.
"I say!"
"Yes?"
"You do love old Derek, don't you?
"I don't know!"
"You don't know! Oh, I say, come now! You must know! Pull up your socks, old thing …  You either love a chappie or you don't."
Jill smiled painfully.
"How nice it would be if everything were as simple and straightforward as that. Haven't you ever heard that the dividing line between love and hate is just a thread? Poets have said so a great number of times."
"Oh, poets!" said Freddie, dismissing the genus with a wave of the hand. He had been compelled to read Shakespeare and all that sort of thing at school, but it had left him cold, and since growing to man's estate he had rather handed the race of bards the mitten. He liked Doss Chiderdoss' stuff in the Sporting Times, but beyond that he was not much of a lad for poets.
"Can't you understand a girl in my position not being able to make up her mind whether she loves a man or despises him?"
Freddie shook his head.
"No," he said. "It sounds dashed silly to me!"
"Then what's the good of talking?" cried Jill. "It only hurts."
"But—won't you come back to England?"
"No."
"Oh, I say! Be a sport! Take a stab at it!"
Jill laughed again—another of those grating laughs which afflicted Freddie with a sense of foreboding and failure. Something had undoubtedly gone wrong with the works. He began to fear that at some point in the conversation—just where he could not say—he had been less diplomatic than he might have been.
"You speak as if you were inviting me to a garden-party! No, I won't take a stab at it. You've a lot to learn about women, Freddie!"
"Women are rum!" conceded that perplexed ambassador.
Jill began to move away.
"Don't go!" urged Freddie.
"Why not? What's the use of talking any more? Have you ever broken an arm or a leg, Freddie?"
"Yes," said Freddie, mystified. "As a matter of fact, my last year at Oxford, playing soccer for the college in a friendly game, some blighter barged into me and I came down on my wrist. But …"
"It hurt?"
"Like the deuce!"
"And then it began to get better, I suppose. Well, used you to hit it and twist it and prod it, or did you leave it alone to try and heal? I won't talk any more about Derek! I simply won't! I'm all smashed up inside, and I don't know if I'm ever going to get well again, but at least I'm going to give myself a chance. I'm working as hard as ever I can, and I'm forcing myself not to think of him. I'm in a sling, Freddie, like your wrist, and I don't want to be prodded. I hope we shall see a lot of each other while you're over here—you always were the greatest dear in the world—but you mustn't mention Derek again, and you mustn't ask me to go home. If you avoid those subjects, we'll be as happy as possible. And now I'm going to leave you to talk to poor Nelly. She has been hovering round for the last ten minutes, waiting for a chance to speak to you.
Freddie started violently.
"Oh, I say! What rot!"
Jill had gone, and he was still gaping after her, when Nelly Bryant moved towards him—shyly, like a worshiper approaching a shrine.
"Hello, Mr Rooke!" said Nelly.
"Hullo-ullo-ullo!" said Freddie.
Nelly fixed her large eyes on his face. A fleeting impression passed through Freddie's mind that she was looking unusually pretty this morning: nor was the impression unjustified. Nelly was wearing for the first time a Spring suit which was the outcome of hours of painful selection among the wares of a dozen different stores, and the knowledge that the suit was just right seemed to glow from her like an inner light.
"How nice it is, your being here!"
Freddie waited for the inevitable question, the question with which Jill had opened their conversation; but it did not come. He was surprised, but relieved. He hated long explanations, and he was very doubtful whether loyalty to Jill could allow him to give them to Nelly. His reason for being where he was had to do so intimately with Jill's most private affairs. A wave of gratitude to Nelly swept through him when he realised that she was either incurious or else too delicate-minded to show inquisitiveness.
As a matter of fact, it was delicacy that kept Nelly silent. Seeing Freddie here at the theatre, she had, as is not uncommon with fallible mortals, put two and two together and made the answer four when it was not four at all. She had been deceived by circumstantial evidence. Jill, whom she had left in England wealthy and secure, she had met again in New York penniless as the result of some Stock Exchange cataclysm in which, she remembered with the vagueness with which one recalls once-heard pieces of information, Freddie Rooke had been involved. True, she seemed to recollect hearing that Freddie's losses had been comparatively slight, but his presence in the chorus of "The Rose of America" seemed to her proof that after all the must have been devastating. She could think of no other reason except loss of money which could have placed Freddie in the position in which she now found him, so she accepted it; and, with the delicacy which was innate in her and which a hard life had never blunted, decided, directly she saw him, to make no allusion to the disaster.
Such was Nelly's view of the matter, and sympathy gave to her manner a kind of maternal gentleness which acted on Freddie, raw from his late encounter with Mr Johnson Miller and disturbed by Jill's attitude in the matter of poor old Derek, like a healing balm. His emotions were too chaotic for analysis, but one thing stood out clear from the welter—the fact that he was glad to be with Nelly as he had never been glad to be with a girl before, and found her soothing as he had never supposed a girl could be soothing.
They talked desultorily of unimportant things, and every minute found Freddie more convinced that Nelly was not as other girls. He felt that he must see more of her.
"I say," he said. "When this binge is over … when the rehearsal finishes, you know, how about a bite to eat?"
"I should love it. I generally go to the Automat."
"The how-much? Never heard of it."
"In Times Square. It's cheap, you know."
"I was thinking of the Cosmopolis."
"But that's so expensive."
"Oh, I don't know. Much the same as any of the other places, isn't it?"
Nelly's manner became more motherly than ever. She bent forward and touched his arm affectionately.
"You haven't to keep up any front with me," she said gently. "I don't care whether you're rich or poor or what. I mean, of course I'm awfully sorry you've lost your money, but it makes it all the easier for us to be real pals, don't you think so?"
"Lost my money!"
"Well, I know you wouldn't be here if you hadn't. I wasn't going to say anything about it, but, when you talked of the Cosmopolis, I just had to. You lost your money in the same thing Jill Mariner lost hers, didn't you? I was sure you had, the moment I saw you here. Who cares? Money isn't everything!"
Astonishment kept Freddie silent for an instant: after that he refrained from explanations of his own free will. He accepted the situation and rejoiced in it. Like many other wealthy and modest young men, he had always had a sneaking suspicion at the back of his mind that any girl who was decently civil to him was so from mixed motives—or more likely, motives that were not even mixed. Well, dash it, here was a girl who seemed to like him although under the impression that he was broke to the wide. It was an intoxicating experience. It made him feel a better chap. It fortified his self-respect.
"You know," he said, stammering a little, for he found a sudden difficulty in controlling his voice. "You're a dashed good sort!"
"I'm awfully glad you think so."
There was a silence—as far, at least, as he and she were concerned. In the outer world, beyond the piece of scenery under whose shelter they stood, stirring things, loud and exciting things, seemed to be happening. Some sort of an argument appeared to be in progress. The rasping voice of Mr Goble was making itself heard from the unseen auditorium. These things they sensed vaguely, but they were too occupied with each other to ascertain details.
"What was the name of that place again?" asked Freddie. "The what-ho-something?"
"The Automat?"
"That's the little chap! We'll go there, shall we?"
"The food's quite good. You go and help yourself out of slot-machines, you know."
"My favorite indoor sport!" said Freddie with enthusiasm. "Hullo! What's up? It sounds as if there were dirty work at the cross-roads!"
The voice of the assistant stage-manager was calling—sharply excited, agitation in every syllable.
"All the gentlemen of the chorus on the stage, please! Mr Goble wants all the chorus—gentlemen on the stage!"
"Well, cheerio for the present," said Freddie. "I suppose I'd better look into this." He made his way onto the stage.
There is an insidious something about the atmosphere of a rehearsal of a musical play which saps the finer feelings of those connected with it. Softened by the gentle beauty of the Spring weather, Mr Goble had come to the Gotham Theatre that morning in an excellent temper, firmly intending to remain in an excellent temper all day. Five minutes of "The Rose of America" had sent him back to the normal: and at ten minutes past eleven he was chewing his cigar and glowering at the stage with all the sweetness gone from his soul. When Wally Mason arrived at a quarter past eleven and dropped into the seat beside him, the manager received him with a grunt and even omitted to offer him a cigar. And when a New York theatrical manager does that, it is a certain sign that his mood is of the worst.
One may find excuses for Mr Goble. "The Rose of America" would have tested the equanimity of a far more amiable man: and on Mr Goble what Otis Pilkington had called its delicate whimsicality jarred profoundly. He had been brought up in the lower-browed school of musical comedy, where you shelved the plot after the opening number and filled in the rest of the evening by bringing on the girls in a variety of exotic costumes, with some good vaudeville specialists to get the laughs. Mr Goble's idea of a musical piece was something embracing trained seals, acrobats, and two or three teams of skilled buck-and-wing dancers, with nothing on the stage, from a tree to a lamp-shade, which could not suddenly turn into a chorus-girl. The austere legitimateness of "The Rose of America" gave him a pain in the neck. He loathed plot, and "The Rose of America" was all plot.
Why, then, had the earthy Mr. Goble consented to associate himself with the production of this intellectual play? Because he was subject, like all other New York managers, to intermittent spasms of the idea that the time is ripe for a revival of comic opera. Sometimes, lunching in his favorite corner in the Cosmopolis grill-room, he would lean across the table and beg some other manager to take it from him that the time was ripe for a revival of comic opera—or more cautiously, that pretty soon the time was going to be ripe for a revival of comic opera. And the other manager would nod his head and thoughtfully stroke his three chins and admit that, sure as God made little apples, the time was darned soon going to be ripe for a revival of comic opera. And then they would stuff themselves with rich food and light big cigars and brood meditatively.
With most managers these spasms, which may be compared to twinges of conscience, pass as quickly as they come, and they go back to coining money with rowdy musical comedies, quite contented. But Otis Pilkington, happening along with the script of "The Rose of America" and the cash to back it, had caught Mr Goble in the full grip of an attack, and all the arrangements had been made before the latter emerged from the influence. He now regretted his rash act.
"Say, listen," he said to Wally, his gaze on the stage, his words proceeding from the corner of his mouth, "you've got to stick around with this show after it opens on the road. We'll talk terms later. But we've got to get it right, don't care what it costs. See?"
"You think it will need fixing?"
Mr Goble scowled at the unconscious artists, who were now going through a particularly arid stretch of dialogue.
"Fixing! It's all wrong! It don't add up right! You'll have to rewrite it from end to end."
"Well, I've got some ideas about it. I saw it played by amateurs last summer, you know. I could make a quick job of it, if you want me to. But will the author stand for it?"
Mr Goble allowed a belligerent eye to stray from the stage, and twisted it round in Wally's direction.
"Say, listen! He'll stand for anything I say. I'm the little guy that gives orders round here. I'm the big noise!"
As if in support of this statement he suddenly emitted a terrific bellow. The effect was magical. The refined and painstaking artists on the stage stopped as if they had been shot. The assistant stage-director bent sedulously over the footlights, which had now been turned up, shading his eyes with the prompt script.
"Take that over again!" shouted Mr Goble. "Yes, that speech about life being like a water-melon. It don't sound to me as though it meant anything." He cocked his cigar at an angle, and listened fiercely. He clapped his hands. The action stopped again. "Cut it!" said Mr Goble tersely.
"Cut the speech, Mr Goble?" queried the obsequious assistant stage-director.
"Yes. Cut it. It don't mean nothing!"
Down the aisle, springing from a seat at the back, shimmered Mr Pilkington, wounded to the quick.
"Mr Goble! Mr Goble!"
"Well?"
"That is the best epigram in the play."
"The best what?"
"Epigram. The best epigram in the play."
Mr. Goble knocked the ash off his cigar. "The public don't want epigrams. The public don't like epigrams. I've been in the show business fifteen years, and I'm telling you! Epigrams give them a pain under the vest. All right, get on."
Mr Pilkington fluttered agitatedly. This was his first experience of Mr Goble in the capacity of stage-director. It was the latter's custom to leave the early rehearsals of the pieces with which he was connected to a subordinate producer, who did what Mr Goble called the breaking-in. This accomplished, he would appear in person, undo most of the other's work, make cuts, tell the actors how to read their lines, and generally enjoy himself. Producing plays was Mr Goble's hobby. He imagined himself to have a genius in that direction, and it was useless to try to induce him to alter any decision to which he might have come. He regarded those who did not agree with him with the lofty contempt of an Eastern despot.
Of this Mr Pilkington was not yet aware.
"But, Mr Goble … !"
The potentate swung irritably round on him.
"What is it? What is it? Can't you see I'm busy?"
"That epigram …"
"It's out!"
"But … !"
"It's out!"
"Surely," protested Mr Pilkington almost tearfully, "I have a voice …"
"Sure you have a voice," retorted Mr Goble, "and you can use it any old place you want, except in my theatre. Have all the voice you like! Go round the corner and talk to yourself! Sing in your bath! But don't come using it here, because I'm the little guy that does all the talking in this theatre! That fellow gets my goat," he added complainingly to Wally, as Mr Pilkington withdrew like a foiled python. "He don't know nothing about the show business, and he keeps butting in and making fool suggestions. He ought to be darned glad he's getting his first play produced and not trying to teach me how to direct it." He clapped his hands imperiously. The assistant stage-manager bent over the footlights. "What was that that guy said? Lord Finchley's last speech. Take it again."
The gentleman who was playing the part of Lord Finchley, an English character actor who specialized in London "nuts," raised his eyebrows, annoyed. Like Mr Pilkington, he had never before come into contact with Mr Goble as stage-director, and, accustomed to the suaver methods of his native land, he was finding the experience trying. He had not yet recovered from the agony of having that water-melon line cut out of his part. It was the only good line, he considered, that he had. Any line that is cut out of an actor's part is always the only good line he has.
"The speech about Omar Khayyam?" he enquired with suppressed irritation.
"I thought that was the way you said it. All wrong! It's Omar of Khayyam."
"I think you will find that Omar Khayyam is the—ah—generally accepted version of the poet's name," said the portrayer of Lord Finchley, adding beneath his breath. "You silly ass!"
"You say Omar of Khayyam," bellowed Mr Goble. "Who's running this show, anyway?"
"Just as you please."
Mr Goble turned to Wally.
"These actors …" he began, when Mr Pilkington appeared again at his elbow.
"Mr Goble! Mr Goble!"
"What is it now?"
"Omar Khayyam was a Persian poet. His name was Khayyam."
"That wasn't the way I heard it," said Mr Goble doggedly. "Did you?" he enquired of Wally. "I thought he was born at Khayyam."
"You're probably quite right," said Wally, "but, if so, everybody else has been wrong for a good many years. It's usually supposed that the gentleman's name was Omar Khayyam. Khayyam, Omar J. Born 1050 A.D., educated privately and at Bagdad University. Represented Persia in the Olympic Games of 1072, winning the sitting high-jump and the egg-and-spoon race. The Khayyams were quite a well-known family in Bagdad, and there was a lot of talk when Omar, who was Mrs Khayyam's pet son, took to drink writing poetry. They had had it all fixed for him to go into his father's date business."
Mr Goble was impressed. He had a respect for Wally's opinion, for Wally had written "Follow the Girl" and look what a knock-out that had been. He stopped the rehearsal again.
"Go back to that Khayyam speech!" he said, interrupting Lord Finchley in mid-sentence.
The actor whispered a hearty English oath beneath his breath. He had been up late last night, and, in spite of the fair weather, he was feeling a trifle on edge.
"'In the words of Omar of Khayyam'…"
Mr Goble clapped his hands.
"Cut that 'of,'" he said. "The show's too long, anyway."

For some minutes after this the rehearsal proceeded smoothly. If Mr Goble did not enjoy the play, at least he made no criticisms except to Wally. To him he enlarged from time to time on the pain which "The Rose of America" caused him.
"How I ever came to put on junk like this beats me," confessed Mr Goble frankly.
"You probably saw that there was a good idea at the back of it," suggested Wally. "There is, you know. Properly handled, it's an idea that could be made into a success."
"What would you do with it?"
"Oh, a lot of things," said Wally warily. In his younger and callower days he had sometimes been rash enough to scatter views on the reconstruction of plays broadcast, to find them gratefully absorbed and acted upon and treated as a friendly gift. His affection for Mr Goble was not so overpowering as to cause him to give him ideas for nothing now. "Any time you want me to fix it for you, I'll come along. About one and a half per cent of the gross would meet the case, I think."
Mr Goble faced him, registering the utmost astonishment and horror.
"One and a half per cent for fixing a show like this? Why, darn it, there's hardly anything to do to it! It's—it's—in!"
"You called it junk just now."
"Well, all I meant was that it wasn't the sort of thing I cared for myself. The public will eat it! Take it from me, the time is just about ripe for a revival of comic opera."
"This one will want all the reviving you can give it. Better use a pulmotor."
"But that long boob, that Pilkington … he would never stand for my handing you one and a half per cent."
"I thought you were the little guy who arranged things round here."
"But he's got money in the show."
"Well, if he wants to get any out, he'd better call in somebody to rewrite it. You don't have to engage me if you don't want to. But I know I could make a good job of it. There's just one little twist the thing needs and you would have quite a different piece."
"What's that?" enquired Mr Goble casually.
"Oh, just a little … what shall I say?… a little touch of what-d'you-call-it and a bit of thingummy. You know the sort of thing! That's all it wants."
Mr Goble gnawed his cigar, baffled.
"You think so, eh?" he said at length.
"And perhaps a suspicion of je-ne-sais-quoi," added Wally.
Mr Goble worried his cigar, and essayed a new form of attack.
"You've done a lot of work for me," he said. "Good work!"
"Glad you liked it," said Wally.
"You're a good kid! I like having you around. I was half thinking of giving you a show to do this Fall. Corking book. French farce. Ran two years in Paris. But what's the good, if you want the earth?"
"Always useful, the earth. Good thing to have."
"See here, if you'll fix up this show for half of one per cent, I'll give you the other to do."
"You shouldn't slur your words so. For a moment I thought you said 'half of one per cent.' One and a half of course you really said."
"If you won't take half, you don't get the other."
"All right," said Wally. "There are lots of other managers in New York. Haven't you seen them popping about? Rich, enterprising men, and all of them love me like a son."
"Make it one per cent," said Mr Goble, "and I'll see if I can fix it with Pilkington."
"One and a half."
"Oh, damn it, one and a half, then," said Mr Goble morosely. "What's the good of splitting straws?"
"Forgotten Sports of the Past—Splitting the Straw. All right. If you drop me a line to that effect, legibly signed with your name, I'll wear it next my heart. I shall have to go now. I have a date. Good-bye. Glad everything's settled and everybody's happy."
For some moments after Wally had left, Mr Goble sat hunched up in his orchestra-chair, smoking sullenly, his mood less sunny than ever. Living in a little world of sycophants, he was galled by the off-hand way in which Wally always treated him. There was something in the latter's manner which seemed to him sometimes almost contemptuous. He regretted the necessity of having to employ him. There was, of course, no real necessity why he should have employed Wally.  "Follow the Girl" was the last outstanding musical success in New York theatrical history: Wally had written it: therefore nobody but Wally was capable of rewriting "The Rose of America." The thing had for Mr Goble the inevitability of Fate. Except for deciding mentally that Wally had swelled head, there was nothing to be done.
Having decided that Wally had swelled head and not feeling much better, Mr Goble concentrated his attention on the stage. A good deal of action had taken place there during recently concluded business talk, and the unfortunate Finchley was back again, playing another of his scenes. Mr Goble glared at Lord Finchley. He did not like him, and he did not like the way he was speaking his lines.
The part of Lord Finchley was a non-singing role. It was a type part. Otis Pilkington had gone to the straight stage to find an artist, and had secured the not uncelebrated Wentworth Hill, who had come over from London to play in an English comedy which had just closed. The newspapers had called the play thin, but had thought that Wentworth Hill was an excellent comedian. Mr Hill thought so too, and it was consequently a shock to his already disordered nerves when a bellow from the auditorium stopped him in the middle of one of his speeches and a rasping voice informed him that he was doing it all wrong.
"I beg your pardon?" said Mr. Hill, quietly but dangerously, stepping to the footlights.
"All wrong!" repeated Mr Goble.
"Really?" Wentworth Hill, who a few years earlier had spent several terms at Oxford University before being sent down for aggravated disorderliness, had brought little away with him from that seat of learning except the Oxford manner. This he now employed upon Mr Goble with an icy severity which put the last touch to the manager's fermenting state of mind. "Perhaps you would be kind enough to tell me just how you think that part should be played?"
Mr Goble marched down the aisle.
"Speak out to the audience," he said, stationing himself by the orchestra pit. "You're turning your head away all the darned time."
"I may be wrong," said Mr Hill, "but I have played a certain amount, don't you know, in pretty good companies, and I was always under the impression that one should address one's remarks to the person one was speaking to, not deliver a recitation to the gallery. I was taught that that was the legitimate method."
The word touched off all the dynamite in Mr Goble. Of all things in the theatre he detested most the "legitimate method." His idea of producing was to instruct the cast to come down to the footlights and hand it to 'em. These people who looked up stage and talked to the audience through the backs of their necks revolted him.
"Legitimate! That's a hell of a thing to be! Where do you get that legitimate stuff? You aren't playing Ibsen!"
"Nor am I playing a knockabout vaudeville sketch."
"Don't talk back at me!"
"Kindly don't shout at me!
Open defiance was a thing which Mr Goble had never encountered before, and for a moment it deprived him of breath. He recovered it, however, almost immediately.
"You're fired!"
"On the contrary," said Mr Hill, "I'm resigning." He drew a green-covered script from his pocket and handed it with an air to the pallid assistant stage-director. Then, more gracefully than ever Freddie Rooke had managed to move downstage under the tuition of Johnson Miller, he moved upstage to the exit. "I trust that you will be able to find someone who will play the part according to your ideas!"
 He waved to the assistant stage-director. "Send the chorus-men on the stage!"
"All the gentlemen of the chorus on the stage, please!" shrilled the assistant stage-director, bounding into the wings like a retriever.
"Mr Goble wants all the chorus-gentlemen on the stage!"
There was a moment, when the seven male members of "The Rose of America" ensemble lined up self-consciously before his gleaming eyes, when Mr Goble repented of his brave words. An uncomfortable feeling passed across his mind that Fate had called his bluff and that he would not be able to make good. All chorus-men are exactly alike, and they are like nothing else on earth. Even Mr Goble, anxious as he was to overlook their deficiencies, could not persuade himself that in their ranks stood even an adequate Lord Finchley. And then, just as a cold reaction from his fervid mood was about to set in, he perceived that Providence had been good to him. There, at the extreme end of the line, stood a young man who, as far as appearance went, was the ideal Lord Finchley,—as far as appearance went, a far better Lord Finchley than the late Mr Hill. He beckoned imperiously.
"You at the end!"
"Me?" said the young man.
"Yes, you. What's your name?"
"Rooke. Frederick Rooke, don't you know."
"You're English, aren't you?"
"Eh? Oh, yes, absolutely!"
"Ever played a part before?"
"Part? Oh, I see what you mean. Well, in amateur theatricals, you know, and all that sort of rot."
His words were music to Mr Goble's ears. He felt that his Napoleonic action had justified itself by success. His fury left him. If he had been capable of beaming, one would have said that he beamed at Freddie.
"Well, you play the part of Lord Finchley from now on. Come to my office this afternoon for your contract. Clear the stage. We've wasted enough time."
Five minutes later, in the wings, Freddie, receiving congratulations from Nelly Bryant, asserted himself.
"Not the Automat today, I think, what! Now that I'm a jolly old star and all that sort of thing, it can't be done. Directly this is over we'll roll round to the Cosmopolis. A slight celebration is indicated, what? Right ho! Rally round, dear heart, rally round!"
The lobby of the Hotel Cosmopolis is the exact center of New York, the spot where at certain hours one is sure of meeting everybody one knows. The first person that Nelly and Freddie saw, as they passed through the swing doors, was Jill. She was seated on the chair by the big pillar in the middle of the hall.
"What ho!" said Freddie. "Waiting for someone?"
"Hullo, Freddie. Yes, I'm waiting for Wally Mason. I got a note from him this morning, asking me to meet him here. I'm a little early. I haven't congratulated you yet. You're wonderful!"
"Thanks, old girl. Our young hero is making pretty hefty strides in his chosen profesh, what! Mr Rooke, who appears quite simple and unspoiled by success, replied to our representative's enquiry as to his future plans that he proposed to stagger into the grill-room and imbibe about eighteen dollars' worth of lunch. Yes, it is a bit of all right, taking it by and large, isn't it? I mean to say, the salary, the jolly old salary, you know … quite a help when a fellow's lost all his money!"
Jill was surprised to observe that the Last of the Rookes was contorting his face in an unsightly manner that seemed to be an attempt at a wink, pregnant with hidden meaning. She took her cue dutifully, though without understanding.
"Oh, yes," she replied.
Freddie seemed grateful. With a cordial "Cheerio!" he led Nelly off to the grill-room.
"I didn't know Jill knew Mr Mason," said Nelly, as they sat down at their table.
"No?" said Freddie absently, running an experienced eye over the bill-of-fare. He gave an elaborate order. "What was that? Oh, absolutely! Jill and I and Wally were children together."
"How funny you should all be together again like this."
"Yes. Oh, good Lord!"
"What's the matter?"
"It's nothing. I meant to send a cable to a pal of mine in England. I'll send it after lunch."
Freddie took out his handkerchief, and tied a knot in it. He was slightly ashamed of the necessity of taking such a precaution, but it was better to be on the safe side. His interview with Jill at the theatre had left him with the conviction that there was only one thing for him to do, and that was to cable poor old Derek to forget impending elections and all the rest of it and pop over to America at once. He knew that he would never have the courage to re-open the matter with Jill himself. As an ambassador he was a spent force. If Jill was to be wooed from her mood of intractability, Derek was the only man to do it. Freddie was convinced that, seeing him in person, she would melt and fall into his arms. Too dashed absurd, Freddie felt, two loving hearts being separated like this and all that sort of thing. He replaced his handkerchief in his pocket, relieved, and concentrated himself on the entertainment of Nelly. A simple task, for, the longer he was with this girl, the easier did it seem to talk to her.
Jill, left alone in the lobby, was finding the moments pass quite pleasantly. She liked watching the people as they came in. One or two of the girls of the company fluttered in like birds, were swooped upon by their cavaliers, and fluttered off to the grill-room. The red-headed Babe passed her with a genial nod, and, shortly after, Lois Denham, the willowy recipient of sunbursts from her friend Izzy of the hat-checks, came by in company with a sallow, hawk-faced young man with a furtive eye, whom Jill took—correctly—to be Izzy himself. Lois was looking pale and proud, and from the few words which came to Jill's ears as they neared her, seemed to be annoyed at having been kept waiting.
It was immediately after this that the swing-doors revolved rather more violently than usual, and Mr Goble burst into view.
There was a cloud upon Mr Goble's brow, seeming to indicate that his grievance against life had not yet been satisfactorily adjusted: but it passed as he saw Jill, and he came up to her with what he would probably have claimed to be an ingratiating smile.
"Hello!" said Mr Goble. "All alone?"
Jill was about to say that the condition was merely temporary when the manager went on.
"Come and have a bit of lunch."
"Thank you very much," said Jill, with the politeness of dislike, "but I'm waiting for someone."
"Chuck him!" advised Mr Goble cordially.
"No, thanks, I couldn't, really."
The cloud began to descend again upon Mr Goble's brow. He was accustomed to having these invitations of his treated as royal commands.
"Come along!"
"I'm afraid it's impossible."
Mr Goble subjected her to a prolonged stare, seemed about to speak, changed his mind, and swung off moodily in the direction of the grill-room. He was not used to this sort of treatment.
He had hardly gone, when Wally appeared.
"What was he saying to you?" demanded Wally abruptly, without preliminary greeting.
"He was asking me to lunch."
Wally was silent for a moment. His good-natured face wore an unwonted scowl.
"He went in there, of course?" he said, pointing to the grill-room.
"Yes."
"Then let's go into the other room," said Wally. He regained his good-humor. "It was awfully good of you to come. I didn't know whether you would be able to."
"It was very nice of you to invite me."
Wally grinned.
"How perfect our manners are! It's a treat to listen! How did you know that that was the one hat in New York I wanted you to wear?"
"Oh, these things get about. Do you like it?"
"It's wonderful. Let's take this table, shall we?"
They sat down. The dim, tapestry-hung room soothed Jill. She was feeling a little tired after the rehearsal. At the far end of the room an orchestra was playing a tune that she remembered and liked. Her mind went back to the last occasion on which she and Wally had sat opposite each other at a restaurant. How long ago it seemed! She returned to the present to find Wally speaking to her.
"You left very suddenly the other night," said Wally.
"I didn't want to meet Freddie."
Wally looked at her commiseratingly.
"I don't want to spoil your lunch," he said, "but Freddie knows all. He has tracked you down. He met Nelly Bryant, whom he seems to have made friends with in London, and she told him where you were and what you were doing. For a girl who fled at his mere approach the night before last, you don't seem very agitated by the news," he said, as Jill burst into a peal of laughter.
"You haven't heard?"
"Heard what?"
"Freddie got Mr Pilkington to put him in the chorus of the piece. He was rehearsing when I arrived at the theatre this morning, and having a terrible time with Mr Miller.  So now Freddie is one of the principals, and bursting with pride!"
Wally threw his head back and uttered a roar of appreciation which caused a luncher at a neighboring table to drop an oyster which he was poising in mid-air.
"Don't make such a noise!" said Jill severely. "Everyone's looking at you."
"I must! It's the most priceless thing I ever heard. I've always maintained and I always will maintain that for pure lunacy nothing can touch the musical comedy business. There isn't anything that can't happen in musical comedy. 'Alice in Wonderland' is nothing to it."
"Have you felt that, too? That's exactly how I feel. It's like a perpetual 'Mad Hatter's Tea-Party.'"
"But what on earth made Freddie join the company at all?"
A sudden gravity descended upon Jill. The words had reminded her of the thing which she was perpetually striving to keep out of her thoughts.
"He said he wanted to be there to keep an eye on me."
Gravity is infectious. Wally's smile disappeared. He, too, had been recalled to thoughts which were not pleasant.
Wally crumbled his roll. There was a serious expression on his face.
"Freddie was quite right. I didn't think he had so much sense."
"Freddie was not right," flared Jill. The recollection of her conversation with that prominent artist still had the power to fire her independent soul. "I'm not a child. I can look after myself. What I do is my own business."
"I'm afraid you're going to find that your business is several people's business. I am interested in it myself. I don't like your being on the stage. Now bite my head off!"
"It's very kind of you to bother about me …"
"I said 'Bite my head off!' I didn't say 'Freeze me!' I take the license of an old friend who in his time has put worms down your back, and I repeat—I don't like your being on the stage."
"I shouldn't have thought you would have been so"—Jill sought for a devastating adjective—"so mid-Victorian!"
"As far as you are concerned, I'm the middest Victorian in existence. Mid is my middle name." Wally met her indignant gaze squarely. "I-do-not-like-your-being-on-the-stage! Especially in any company which Ike Goble is running."
"Why Mr Goble particularly?"
"Because he is not the sort of man you ought to be coming in contact with."
"What nonsense!"
"It isn't nonsense at all. I suppose you've read a lot about the morals of theatrical managers …"
"Yes. And it seemed to be exaggerated and silly."
"So it is. There's nothing wrong with most of them. As a general thing, they are very decent fellows,—extraordinarily decent if you think of the position they are in. I don't say that in a business way there's much they won't try to put over on you. In the theatre, when it comes to business, everything goes except biting and gouging. 'There's never a law of God or man runs north of fifty-three.' If you alter that to 'north of Forty-first Street,' it doesn't scan as well, but it's just as true. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the Golden Rule is suspended there. You get used to it after you have been in the theatre for awhile, and, except for leaving your watch and pocketbook at home when you have to pay a call on a manager and keeping your face to him so that he can't get away with your back collar-stud, you don't take any notice of it. It's all a game.   In either case, it makes no difference to the pleasantness of your relations.  There is nothing personal in it. He has probably done his best friend out of a few thousand dollars the same morning, and you see them lunching together after the ceremony as happily as possible. You've got to make allowances for managers. They are the victims of heredity. When a burglar marries a hat-check girl, their offspring goes into the theatrical business automatically, and he can't shake off the early teaching which he imbibed at his father's knee. But morals …"
Wally broke off to allow the waiter to place a fried sole before him. Waiters always select the moment when we are talking our best to intrude themselves.
"As regards morals," resumed Wally, "that is a different matter. Most managers are respectable, middle-aged men with wives and families. They are in the business to make money, and they don't want anything else out of it. The girls in their companies are like so many clerks to them, just machines that help to bring the money in. They don't know half a dozen of them to speak to. But our genial Ike is not like that." Wally consumed a mouthful of sole. "Ike Goble is a bad citizen. He paws! He's a slinker and a prowler and a leerer. He's a pest and a worm!   Not knocking him, of course!" added Wally magnanimously. "Far be it from me to knock anyone! But, speaking with the utmost respect and viewing him in the most favorable light, he is a combination of tom-cat and the things you see when you turn over a flat stone! Such are the reasons why I am sorry that you are in his company."
Jill had listened to this diatribe with a certain uneasiness.
Her brief encounters with Mr Goble told her that every word was probably true. She could still feel the unpleasant sensation of being inspected by the eye which Wally had compared—quite justly—to that of a codfish. But her pride forbade any admission of weakness.
"I can take care of myself," she said.
"I don't doubt it," said Wally. "And you could probably take care of yourself if you fell into a muddy pond. But I shouldn't like to stand on the bank and watch you doing it. I know what girls in the chorus have to go through. Hanging about for hours in draughts, doing nothing, while the principals go through their scenes, and yelled at if they try to relieve the tedium of captivity with a little light conversation …"
"Yes," admitted Jill. "There has been a good lot of that."
"There always is. I believe if the stage-carpenter was going to stick a screw in a flat, they would call a chorus-rehearsal to watch him do it … Jill, you must get out of it. It's no life for you. The work …"
"I like the work."
"While it's new, perhaps, but …"
Jill interrupted him passionately.
"Oh, can't you understand!" she cried. "I want the work. I need it. I want something to do, something to occupy my mind. I hate talking about it, but you know how things are with me. Freddie must have told you. Even if he didn't, you must have guessed, meeting me here all alone and remembering how things were when we last met. You must understand! Haven't you ever had a terrible shock or a dreadful disappointment that seemed to smash up the whole world? And didn't you find that the only possible thing to do was to work and work and work as hard as ever you could? When I first came to America, I nearly went mad. Uncle Chris sent me down to a place on Long Island, and I had nothing to do all day but think. I couldn't stand it. I ran away and came to New York and met Nelly Bryant and got this work to do. It saved me. It kept me busy all day and tired me out and didn't give me time to think. The harder it is, the better it suits me. It's an antidote. I simply wouldn't give it up now. As for what you were saying, I must put up with that. The other girls do, so why shouldn't I?"
"They are toughened to it."
"Then I must get toughened to it. What else is there for me to do? I must do something."
"Marry me!" said Wally, reaching across the table and putting his hand on hers.
The suddenness of it startled Jill into silence. She snatched her hand away and drew back, looking at him in wonderment. She was confusedly aware of a babble of sound,—people talking, people laughing, the orchestra playing a lively tune. All her senses seemed to have become suddenly more acute. She was intensely alive to small details.
She turned her head away, and looked out into the restaurant. It seemed incredible that all these people, placidly intent upon their food and their small talk, should not be staring at her, wondering what she was going to say; nudging each other and speculating. Their detachment made her feel alone and helpless. She was nothing to them and they did not care what happened to her, just as she had been nothing to those frozen marshes down at Brookport. She was alone in an indifferent world, with her own problems to settle for herself.
Other men had asked Jill to marry them,—a full dozen of them, here and there in country houses and at London before she had met and loved Derek Underhill: but that she had had in the way of experience had prepared her for Wally. These others had given her time to marshal her forces, to collect herself, to weigh them thoughtfully in the balance.  They had not shot a proposal at her like a bullet from out of the cover of a conversation that had nothing to do with their emotions at all.
Yet, now that the shock of it was dying away, she began to remember signs she would have noticed, speeches which ought to have warned her …
"Wally!" she gasped.
She found that he affected her in an entirely different fashion from the luckless dozen of those London days. He seemed to matter more, to be more important, almost—though she rebelled at the word—more dangerous.
"Let me take you out of it all! You aren't fit for this sort of life. I can't bear to see you …"
Jill bent forward and touched his hand. He started as though he had been burned. The muscles of his throat were working.
"Wally, it's—" She paused for a word. "Kind" was horrible. It would have sounded cold, almost supercilious. "Sweet" was the sort of thing she could imagine Lois Penham saying to her friend Izzy. She began her sentence again. "You're a dear to say that, but …"
Wally laughed chokingly.
"You think I'm altruistic? I'm not. I'm just as selfish and self-centered as any other man who wants a thing very badly. I'm as altruistic as a child crying for the moon.  I've been dreaming about you for a dozen years, thinking about you, wondering about you—wondering where you were, what you were doing, how you looked. I used to think that it was just sentimentality, that you merely stood for a time of my life when I was happier than I have ever been since. I used to think that you were just a sort of peg on which I was hanging a pleasant sentimental regret for days which could never come back. You were a memory that seemed to personify all the other memories of the best time of my life. You were the goddess of old associations. Then I met you in London, and it was different. I wanted you—you!  I knew I loved you directly you spoke to me at the theatre that night of the fire.   I might have expected it, but I couldn't keep my jealousy from showing itself, and you snubbed me as I deserved. But now … things are different now. Everything's different, except my love."
 A man at the next table, a corpulent red-faced man, had begun to stare. He could have heard nothing, for Wally had spoken in a low voice; but plainly he was aware that something more interesting was happening at their table than at any of the other tables, and he was watching with a bovine inquisitiveness which affected Jill with a sense of outrage. A moment before, she had resented the indifference of the outer world. Now, this one staring man seemed like a watching multitude. There were tears in her eyes, and she felt that the red-faced man suspected it.
"Wally …" Her voice broke. "It's impossible."
"Why? Why, Jill?"
"Because … Oh, it's impossible!"
There was a silence.
"Because …" He seemed to find a difficulty in speaking, "Because of Underhill?"
Jill nodded. She felt wretched. The monstrous incongruity of her surroundings oppressed her. The orchestra dashed into a rollicking melody, which set her foot tapping in spite of herself. At a near-by table somebody was shouting with laughter. Two waiters at a service-stand were close enough for her to catch snatches of their talk. They were arguing about an order of fried potatoes. Once again her feelings veered round, and she loathed the detachment of the world. Her heart ached for Wally. She could not look at him, but she knew exactly what she would see if she did,—honest, pleading eyes searching her face for something which she could not give.
"Yes," she said.
The table creaked. Wally was leaning further forward. He seemed like something large and pathetic,—a big dog in trouble. She hated to be hurting him. And all the time her foot tapped accompaniment to the rag-time tune.

Jill turned and faced him. His eyes seemed to leap at her, and they were just as she had pictured them.
"You don't understand," she said gently. "You don't understand."
"It's ended. It's over."
Jill shook her head.
"You can't still love him, after what has happened!"
"I don't know," said Jill unhappily.
The words seemed to bewilder Wally as much as they had bewildered Freddie.
"You don't know!"
 Wally quivered. It was a trick she had had as a child.
"Don't talk for a minute, Wally," she said. "I want to think."
Her eyes opened.
"It's like this," she said. He had seen her look at him exactly the same way a hundred times. "I don't suppose I can make you understand, but this is how it is.  Furniture. And there wasn't any space left. You—you couldn't put anything else in till you had taken all that out, could you? It might not be worth anything, but it would still be there taking up all the room."
Wally nodded.
"Yes," he said. "I see."
"My heart's full, Wally dear. I know it's just lumber that's choking it up, but it's difficult to get it out. It takes time getting it out. I put it in, thinking it was wonderful furniture, the most wonderful in the world, and—I was cheated. It was just lumber. But it's there. It's still there. It's there all the time. And what am I to do?"
The orchestra crashed, and was silent. The sudden stillness seemed to break a spell. The world invaded the little island where they sat. A chattering party of girls and men brushed past them. The waiter, judging that they had been there long enough, slipped a strip of paper, decorously turned upside down, in front of Wally. He took the money, and went away to get change.
Wally turned to Jill.
"I understand," he said. "All this hasn't happened, and we're just as good pals as before?"
"Yes."
"But …" He forced a laugh … "mark my words, a time may come, and then … !"
"I don't know," said Jill.
"A time may come," repeated Wally. "At any rate, let me think so. It has nothing to do with me. It's for you to decide, absolutely. I'm not going to pursue you with my addresses!  I shall be waiting and you will know where to find me. And, in the meantime, yours to command, Wallace Mason. Is that clear?"
"Quite clear." Jill looked at him affectionately. "There's nobody I'd rather open that room to than you, Wally. You know that."
"Is that the solemn truth?"
"The solemn truth!"
"Then," said Wally, "in two minutes you will see a startled waiter. There will be about fourteen dollars change out of that twenty he took away. I'm going to give it all to him."
"You mustn't!"
"Every cent!" said Wally firm. "And the young Greek brigand who stole my hat at the door is going to get a dollar! That, as our ascetic and honorable friend Goble would say, is the sort of little guy I am!"
The red-faced man at the next table eyed them as they went out, leaving behind them a waiter who clutched totteringly for support at the back of a chair.
"Had a row," he decided, "but made it up."
He called for a toothpick.
On the boardwalk at Atlantic City, that much-enduring seashore resort which has been the birthplace of so many musical plays, there stands an all-day and all-night restaurant, under the same management and offering the same hospitality as the one in Columbus Circle at which Jill had taken her first meal on arriving in New York. At least, its hospitality is noisy during the waking and working hours of the day; but there are moments when it has an almost cloistral peace, and the customer, abashed by the cold calm of its snowy marble and the silent gravity of the white-robed attendants, unconsciously lowers his voice and tries to keep his feet from shuffling, like one in a temple. The members of the chorus of "The Rose of America," dropping in by ones and twos at six o'clock in the morning about two weeks after the events recorded in the last chapter, spoke in whispers and gave their orders for breakfast in a subdued undertone.
The dress-rehearsal had just dragged its weary length to a close. It is the custom of the dwellers in Atlantic City, who seem to live entirely for pleasure, to attend a species of vaudeville performance—incorrectly termed a sacred concert—on Sunday nights: and it had been one o'clock in the morning before the concert scenery could be moved out of the theatre and the first act set of "The Rose of America" moved in. And, as by some unwritten law of the drama no dress-rehearsal can begin without a delay of at least an hour and a half, the curtain had not gone up on Mr Miller's opening chorus till half past two. There had been dress-parades, conferences, interminable arguments between the stage-director and a mysterious man in shirtsleeves about the lights, more dress-parades, further conferences, hitches with regard to the sets, and another outbreak of debate on the subject of blues, ambers, and the management of the "spot," which was worked by a plaintive voice, answering to the name of Charlie, at the back of the family circle. But by six o'clock a complete, if ragged, performance had been given, and the chorus, who had partaken of no nourishment since dinner on the previous night, had limped off round the corner for a bite of breakfast before going to bed.
They were a battered and a draggled company, some with dark circles beneath their eyes, others blooming with the unnatural scarlet of the make-up which they had been too tired to take off. The Duchess, haughty to the last, had fallen asleep with her head on the table. The red-headed Babe was lying back in her chair, staring at the ceiling. The Southern girl blinked like an owl at the morning sunshine out on the boardwalk.
The Cherub, whose triumphant youth had brought her almost fresh through a sleepless night, contributed the only remark made during the interval of waiting for the meal.
"The fascination of a thtage life! Why girls leave home!" She looked at her reflection in the little mirror of her vanity-bag. "It is a face!" she murmured reflectively. "But I should hate to have to go around with it long!"
A sallow young man, with the alertness peculiar to those who work on the night-shifts of restaurants, dumped a tray down on the table with a clatter. The Duchess woke up.  The Southern girl ceased to look at the sunshine. Already, at the mere sight of food, the extraordinary recuperative powers of the theatrical worker had begun to assert themselves. In five minutes these girls would be feeling completely restored and fit for anything.
Conversation broke out with the first sip of coffee, and the calm of the restaurant was shattered. Its day had begun.
"It's a great life if you don't weaken," said the Cherub, hungrily attacking her omelette. "And the wortht is yet to come! I thuppose all you old dears realithe that this show will have to be rewritten from end to end, and we'll be rehearthing day and night all the time we're on the road."
"Why?" Lois Denham spoke with her mouth full. "What's wrong with it?"
The Duchess took a sip of coffee.
"Don't make me laugh!" she pleaded. "What's wrong with it? What's right with it, one would feel more inclined to ask!"
"One would feel thtill more inclined," said the Cherub, "to athk why one was thuch a chump as to let oneself in for this sort of thing when one hears on all sides that waitresses earn thixty dollars a month."
"The numbers are all right," argued Babe. "I don't mean the melodies, but Johnny has arranged some good business."
"He always does," said the Southern girl. "Some more buckwheat cakes, please. But what about the book?"
"I never listen to the book."
The Cherub laughed.
"You're too good to yourself! I listened to it right along and take it from me it's sad! Of courthe they'll have it fixed. We can't open in New York like this. My professional reputation wouldn't thtand it! Didn't you thee Wally Mason in front, making notes? They've got him down to do the rewriting."
Jill, who had been listening in a dazed way to the conversation, fighting against the waves of sleep which flooded over her, woke up.
"Was Wally—was Mr Mason there?"
"Sure. Sitting at the back."
Jill couldn't have said whether she was glad or sorry. She had not seen Wally since that afternoon when they lunched together at the Cosmopolis, and the rush of the final weeks of rehearsals had given her little opportunity for thinking of him. At the back of her mind had been the feeling that sooner or later she would have to think of him, but for two weeks she had been too tired and too busy to re-examine him as a factor in her life. There had been times when the thought of him had been like the sunshine on a winter day, warming her with almost an impersonal glow in moments of depression. And then some sharp, poignant memory of Derek would come to blot him out. She remembered the image she had used to explain Derek to Wally, and the truth of it came home to her more strongly than ever. Whatever Derek might have done, he was in her heart and she could not get him out.
She came out of her thoughts to find that the talk had taken another turn.
"And the wortht of it is," the Cherub was saying, "we shall rehearthe all day and give a show every night and work ourselves to the bone, and then, when they're good and ready, they'll fire one of us!"
"That's right!" agreed the Southern girl.
"They couldn't!" Jill cried.
"You wait!" said the Cherub. "They'll never open in New York with thirteen girls. Ike's much too thuperstitious"
"But they wouldn't do a thing like that after we've all worked so hard!"
There was a general burst of sardonic laughter. Jill's opinion of the chivalry of theatrical managers seemed to be higher than that of her more experienced colleagues. "They'll do anything," the Cherub assured her. "You don't know the half of it, dearie," scoffed Lois Denham. "You don't know the half of it!"
"Wait till you've been in as many shows as I have," said Babe, shaking her red locks. "The usual thing is to keep a girl slaving her head off all through the road-tour and then fire her before the New York opening."
"But it's a shame! It isn't fair!"
"If one is expecting to be treated fairly," said the Duchess with a prolonged yawn, "one should not go into the show-business."
And, having uttered this profoundly true maxim, she fell asleep again.
The slumber of the Duchess was the signal for a general move. Her somnolence was catching. The restorative effects of the meal were beginning to wear off. There was a call for a chorus-rehearsal at four o'clock, and it seemed the wise move to go to bed and get some sleep while there was time. The Duchess was roused from her dreams by means of a piece of ice from one of the tumblers; checks were paid; and the company poured out, yawning and chattering, into the sunlight of the empty boardwalk.
Jill detached herself from the group, and made her way to a seat facing the ocean. Tiredness had fallen upon her like a leaden weight, crushing all the power out of her limbs, and the thought of walking to the boarding-house where, from motives of economy, she was sharing a room with the Cherub, paralyzed her.
It was a perfect morning, clear and cloudless, with the warm freshness of a day that means to be hotter later on. The sea sparkled in the sun. Little waves broke lazily on the gray sand. Jill closed her eyes, for the brightness of sun and water was trying; and her thoughts went back to what the Cherub had said.
If Wally was really going to rewrite the play, they would be thrown together. She would be obliged to meet him, and she was not sure that she was ready to meet him. Still, he would be somebody to talk to on subjects other than the one eternal topic of the theatre, somebody who belonged to the old life. She had ceased to regard Freddie Rooke in this light: for Freddie, solemn with his new responsibilities as a principal, was the most whole-hearted devotee of "shop" in the company. Freddie nowadays declined to consider any subject for conversation that did not have to do with "The Rose of America" in general and his share in it in particular. Jill had given him up, and he had paired off with Nelly Bryant. The two were inseparable. Jill had taken one or two meals with them, but Freddie's professional monologues, of which Nelly seemed never to weary, were too much for her. As a result she was now very much alone. There were girls in the company whom she liked, but most of them had their own intimate friends, and she was always conscious of not being really wanted. She was lonely, and, after examining the matter as clearly as her tired mind would allow, she found herself curiously soothed by the thought that Wally would be near to mitigate her loneliness.
She opened her eyes, blinking. Sleep had crept upon her with an insidious suddenness, and she had almost fallen over on the seat. She was just bracing herself to get up and begin the long tramp to the boarding-house, when a voice spoke at her side.
"Hullo! Good morning!"
Jill looked up.
"Hullo, Wally!"
"Surprised to see me?"
"No. Milly Trevor said she had seen you at the rehearsal last night."
Wally came round the bench and seated himself at her side. His eyes were tired, and his chin dark and bristly.
"Had breakfast?"
"Yes, thanks. Have you?"
"Not yet. How are you feeling?"
"Rather tired."
"I wonder you're not dead. I've been through a good many dress-rehearsals, but this one was the record. Why they couldn't have had it comfortably in New York and just have run through the piece without scenery last night, I don't know, except that in musical comedy it's etiquette always to do the most inconvenient thing. They know perfectly well that there was no chance of getting the scenery into the theatre till the small hours. You must be worn out. Why aren't you in bed?"
"I couldn't face the walk. I suppose I ought to be going, though."
She half rose, then sank back again. The glitter of the water hypnotized her. She closed her eyes again. She could hear Wally speaking, then his voice grew suddenly faint and far off, and she ceased to fight the delicious drowsiness.
Jill awoke with a start. She opened her eyes, and shut them again at once. The sun was very strong now. It was one of those prematurely warm days of early Spring which have all the languorous heat of late summer. She opened her eyes once more, and found that she was feeling greatly refreshed. She also discovered that her head was resting on Wally's shoulder.
"Have I been asleep?"
Wally laughed.
"You have been having what you might call a nap." He massaged his left arm vigorously. "You needed it. Do you feel more rested now?"
"Good gracious! Have I been squashing your poor arm all the time? Why didn't you move?"
"I was afraid you would fall over.
"What's the time?"
Wally looked at his watch.
"Just on ten."
"Ten!" Jill was horrified. "Why, I have been giving you cramp for about three hours! You must have had an awful time!"
"Oh, it was all right. I think I dozed off myself. Except that the birds didn't come and cover us with leaves; it was rather like the 'Babes in the Wood.'"
"But you haven't had any breakfast! Aren't you starving?"
"Well, I'm not saying I wouldn't spear a fried egg with some vim if it happened to float past. But there's plenty of time for that. Lots of doctors say you oughtn't to eat breakfast, and Indian fakirs go without food for days at a time in order to develop their souls. Shall I take you back to wherever you're staying? You ought to get a proper sleep in bed."
"Don't dream of taking me. Go off and have something to eat."
"Oh, that can wait. I'd like to see you safely home."
Jill was conscious of a renewed sense of his comfortingness. There was no doubt about it, Wally was different from any other man she had known. She suddenly felt guilty, as if she were obtaining something valuable under false pretences.
"Wally!"
"Hullo?"
"You—you oughtn't to be so good to me!"
"Nonsense! Where's the harm in lending a hand—or, rather, an arm—to a pal in trouble?"
"You know what I mean. I can't … that is to say … it isn't as though … I mean …"
Wally smiled a tired, friendly smile.
"If you're trying to say what I think you're trying to say, don't! We had all that out two weeks ago. I quite understand the position. You mustn't worry yourself about it." He took her arm, and they crossed the boardwalk. "Are we going in the right direction? You lead the way. I know exactly how you feel. We're old friends, and nothing more. But, as an old friend, I claim the right to behave like an old friend. If an old friend can't behave like an old friend, how can an old friend behave? And now we'll rule the whole topic out of the conversation. But perhaps you're too tired for conversation?"
"Oh, no."
"Then I will tell you about the sad death of young Mr Pilkington."
"What!"
"Well, when I say death, I use the word in a loose sense. The human giraffe still breathes, and I imagine, from the speed with which he legged it back to his hotel when we parted, that he still takes nourishment. But really he is dead. His heart is broken. We had a conference after the dress-rehearsal, and our friend Mr Goble told him in no uncertain words—in the whole course of my experience I have never heard words less uncertain—that his damned rotten high-brow false-alarm of a show—I am quoting Mr Goble—would have to be rewritten by alien hands. And these are them! On the right, alien right hand. On the left, alien left hand. Yes, I am the instrument selected for the murder of Pilkington's artistic aspirations. I'm going to rewrite the show. In fact, I have already rewritten the first act and most of the second. Goble foresaw this contingency and told me to get busy two weeks ago, and I've been working hard ever since. We shall start rehearsing the new version tomorrow and open in Baltimore next Monday with practically a different piece. And it's going to be a pippin, believe me, said our hero modestly. A gang of composers has been working in shifts for two weeks, and, by chucking out nearly all of the original music, we shall have a good score. It means a lot of work for you, I'm afraid. All the business of the numbers will have to be re-arranged."
"I like work," said Jill. "But I'm sorry for Mr Pilkington."
"He's all right. He owns seventy per cent of the show. He may make a fortune. He's certain to make a comfortable sum. That is, if he doesn't sell out his interest in pique—or dudgeon, if you prefer it. From what he said at the close of the proceedings, I fancy he would sell out to anybody who asked him. At least, he said that he washed his hands of the piece. He's going back to New York this afternoon,—won't even wait for the opening. Of course, I'm sorry for the poor chap in a way, but he had no right, with the excellent central idea which he got, to turn out such a rotten book. Oh, by the way!"
"Yes?"
"Another tragedy!  Poor old Freddie! He's out!"
"Oh, no!"
"Out!" repeated Wally firmly.
"But didn't you think he was good last night?"
"He was awful! But that isn't why. Goble wanted his part rewritten as a Scotchman, so as to get McAndrew, the fellow who made such a hit last season in 'Hoots, Mon!' That sort of thing is always happening in musical comedy. You have to fit parts to suit whatever good people happen to be available at the moment. When you've had one or two experiences of changing your Italian count to a Jewish millionaire—invariably against time: they always want the script on Thursday next at noon—and then changing him again to a Russian Bolshevik, you begin to realize what is meant by the words 'Death, where is thy sting?' My heart bleeds for Freddie, but what can one do? At any rate he isn't so badly off as a fellow was in one of my shows. In the second act he was supposed to have escaped from an asylum, and the management, in a passion for realism, insisted that he should shave his head. The day after he shaved it, they heard that a superior comedian was disengaged and fired him. It's a ruthless business."
"The girls were saying that one of us would be dismissed."
"Oh, I shouldn't think that's likely."
"I hope not."
"So do I. What are we stopping for?" Jill had halted in front of a shabby-looking house, one of those depressing buildings which spring up overnight at seashore resorts and start to decay the moment the builders have left them.
"I live here."
"Here!" Wally looked at her in consternation. "But …"
Jill smiled.
"We working-girls have got to economize. Besides, it's quite comfortable—fairly comfortable—inside, and it's only for a week." She yawned. "I believe I'm falling asleep again. I'd better hurry in and go to bed. Good-bye, Wally dear. You've been wonderful.
When Jill arrived at the theatre at four o'clock for the chorus rehearsal, the expected blow had not fallen. No steps had apparently been taken to eliminate the thirteenth girl whose presence in the cast preyed on Mr. Goble's superstitious mind. But she found her colleagues still in a condition of pessimistic foreboding. "Wait!" was the gloomy watchword of "The Rose of America" chorus.
The rehearsal passed off without event. It lasted until six o'clock, when Jill, the Cherub, and two or three of the other girls went to snatch a hasty dinner before returning to the theatre to make up. It was not a cheerful meal. Reaction had set in after the overexertion of the previous night, and it was too early for first-night excitement to take its place. Everybody, even the Cherub, whose spirits seldom failed her, was depressed, and the idea of an overhanging doom had grown. It seemed now to be merely a question of speculating on the victim, and the conversation gave Jill, as the last addition to the company and so the cause of swelling the ranks of the chorus to the unlucky number, a feeling of guilt. She was glad when it was time to go back to the theatre.
The moment she and her companions entered the dressing-room, it was made clear to them that the doom had fallen. In a chair in the corner, all her pretence and affectation swept away in a flood of tears, sat the unhappy Duchess, the center of a group of girls anxious to console but limited in their ideas of consolation to an occasional pat on the back and an offer of a fresh pocket-handkerchief.
"It's tough, honey!" somebody was saying as Jill came in.
Somebody else said it was fierce, and a third girl declared it to be the limit. A fourth girl, well-meaning but less helpful than she would have liked to be, was advising the victim not to worry.
The story of the disaster was brief and easily told. The Duchess, sailing in at the stage-door, had paused at the letter-box to see if Cuthbert, her faithful auto-salesman, had sent her a good-luck telegram. He had, but his good wishes were unfortunately neutralized by the fact that the very next letter in the box was one from the management, crisp and to the point, informing the Duchess that her services would not be required that night or thereafter. It was the subtle meanness of the blow that roused the indignation of "The Rose of America" chorus, the cunning villainy with which it had been timed.
"Poor Mae, if she'd opened tonight, they'd have had to give her two weeks' notice or her salary. But they can fire her without a cent just because she's only been rehearsing and hasn't given a show!"
The Duchess burst into fresh flood of tears.
"Don't you worry, honey!" advised the well-meaning girl, who would have been in her element looking in on Job with Bildad the Shuhite and his friends. "Don't you worry!"
"It's tough!" said the girl, who had adopted that form of verbal consolation.
"It's fierce!" said the girl who preferred that adjective.
The other girl, with an air of saying something new, repeated her statement that it was the limit. The Duchess cried forlornly throughout. She had needed this engagement badly. Chorus salaries are not stupendous, but it is possible to save money by means of them during a New York run, especially if you have spent three years in a milliner's shop and can make your own clothes, as the Duchess, in spite of her air of being turned out by Fifth Avenue modistes, could and did. She had been looking forward, now that this absurd piece was to be rewritten by someone who knew his business and had a good chance of success, to putting by just those few dollars that make all the difference when you are embarking on married life. Cuthbert, for all his faithfulness, could not hold up the financial end of the establishment unsupported for at least another eighteen months; and this disaster meant that the wedding would have to be postponed again. So the Duchess, abandoning that aristocratic manner criticized by some of her colleagues as "up-stage" and by others as "Ritz-y," sat in her chair and consumed pocket-handkerchiefs as fast as they were offered to her.
Jill had been the only girl in the room who had spoken no word of consolation. This was not because she was not sorry for the Duchess. She had never been sorrier for any one in her life. The pathos of that swift descent from haughtiness to misery had bitten deep into her sensitive heart. But she revolted at the idea of echoing the banal words of the others. Words were no good, she thought, as she set her little teeth and glared at an absent management,—a management just about now presumably distending itself with a luxurious dinner at one of the big hotels. Deeds were what she demanded. All her life she had been a girl of impulsive action, and she wanted to act impulsively now. She was in much the same Berserk mood as had swept her, raging, to the defence of Bill the parrot on the occasion of his dispute with Henry of London. The fighting spirit which had been drained from her by the all-night rehearsal had come back in full measure.
"What are you going to do?" she cried. "Aren't you going to do something?"
Do? The members of "The Rose of America" ensemble looked doubtfully at one another. Do? It had not occurred to them that there was anything to be done. These things happened, and you regretted them, but as for doing anything, well, what could you do?
  The change in her startled them. Hitherto they had always looked on her as rather an unusually quiet girl. She had always made herself unobtrusively pleasant to them all. They all liked her. But they had never suspected her of possessing this militant quality. Nobody spoke, but there was a general stir. She had flung a new idea broadcast, and it was beginning to take root. Do something? Well, if it came to that, why not?
"We ought all to refuse to go on tonight unless they let her go on!" Jill declared.
The stir became a movement. Enthusiasm is catching, and every girl is at heart a rebel. And the idea was appealing to the imagination. Refuse to give a show on the opening night! Had a chorus ever done such a thing? They trembled on the verge of making history.
"Strike?" quavered somebody at the back.
"Yes, strike!" cried Jill.
"Hooray! That's the thtuff!" shouted the Cherub, and turned the scale. She was a popular girl, and her adherence to the Cause confirmed the doubters. "Thtrike!"
"Strike! Strike!"
Jill turned to the Duchess, who had been gaping amazedly at the demonstration. She no longer wept, but she seemed in a dream.
"Dress and get ready to go on," Jill commanded. "We'll all dress and get ready to go on. Then I'll go and find Mr Goble and tell him what we mean to do. And, if he doesn't give in, we'll stay here in this room, and there won't be a performance!"
Mr Goble, with a Derby hat on the back of his head and an unlighted cigar in the corner of his mouth, was superintending the erection of the first act set when Jill found him. He was standing with his back to the safety-curtain glowering at a blue canvas, supposed to represent one of those picturesque summer skies which you get at the best places on Long Island. Jill, coming down stage from the staircase that led to the dressing-room, interrupted his line of vision.
"Get out of the light!" bellowed Mr Goble, always a man of direct speech, adding "Damn you!" for good measure.
"Please move to one side," interpreted the stage-director. "Mr Goble is looking at the set."
The head carpenter, who completed the little group, said nothing. Stage carpenters always say nothing. Long association with fussy directors has taught them that the only policy to pursue on opening nights is to withdraw into the silence, wrap themselves up in it, and not emerge until the enemy has grown tired and gone off to worry somebody else.
"It don't look right!" said Mr Goble, cocking his head on one side.
"I see what you mean, Mr Goble," assented the stage-director obsequiously. "It has perhaps a little too much—er—not quite enough—yes, I see what you mean!"
"It's too—damn—BLUE!" rasped Mr Goble, impatient of this vacillating criticism. "That's what's the matter with it."
The head carpenter abandoned the silent policy of a lifetime. He felt impelled to utter. He was a man who, when not at the theatre, spent most of his time in bed, reading all-fiction magazines: but it so happened that once, last summer, he had actually seen the sky; and he considered that this entitled him to speak almost as a specialist on the subject.
"The sky is blue!" he observed huskily. "Yessir! I seen it!"
He passed into the silence again, and, to prevent a further lapse, stopped up his mouth with a piece of chewing-gum.
Mr Goble regarded the silver-tongued orator wrathfully. He was not accustomed to chatter-boxes arguing with him like this. He would probably have said something momentous and crushing, but at this point Jill intervened.
"Mr Goble."
The manager swung round on her.
"What is it?"
It is sad to think how swiftly affection can change to dislike in this world. Two weeks before, Mr Goble had looked on Jill with favor. She had seemed good in his eyes. But that refusal of hers to lunch with him, followed by a refusal some days later to take a bit of supper somewhere, had altered his views on feminine charm. If it had been left to him, as most things were about his theatre, to decide which of the thirteen girls should be dismissed, he would undoubtedly have selected Jill. But at this stage in the proceedings there was the unfortunate necessity of making concessions to the temperamental Johnson Miller. Mr Goble was aware that the dance-director's services would be badly needed in the re-arrangement of the numbers during the coming week or so, and he knew that there were a dozen managers waiting eagerly to welcome him if he threw up his present job, so he had been obliged to approach him in quite a humble spirit and enquire which of his female chorus could be most easily spared. And, as the Duchess had a habit of carrying her haughty languor onto the stage and employing it as a substitute for the chorea which was Mr. Miller's ideal, the dancer-director had chosen her. To Mr Goble's dislike of Jill, therefore, was added now something of the fury of the baffled potentate.
"'Jer want?" he demanded.
"Mr Goble is extremely busy," said the stage-director. "Ex-tremely."
A momentary doubt as to the best way of approaching her subject had troubled Jill on her way downstairs, but, now that she was on the battle-field confronting the enemy, she found herself cool, collected, and full of a cold rage which steeled her nerves without confusing her mind.
"I came to ask you to let Mae D'Arcy go on tonight."
"Who the hell's Mae D'Arcy?" Mr Goble broke off to bellow at a scene-shifter who was depositing the wall of Mrs Stuyvesant van Dyke's Long Island residence too far down stage. "Not there, you fool! Higher up!"
"You gave her her notice this evening," said Jill.
"Well, what about it?"
"We want you to withdraw it."
"Who's 'we'?"
"The other girls and myself."
Mr Goble jerked his head so violently that the Derby hat flew off, to be picked up, dusted, and restored by the stage-director.
"Oh, so you don't like it? Well, you know what you can do …"
"Yes," said Jill, "we do. We are going to strike."
"What!"
 There won't be a performance tonight, unless you like to give one without a chorus."
"Are you crazy!"
"Perhaps. But we're quite unanimous."
Mr Goble, like most theatrical managers, was not good at words of over two syllables.
"You're what?"
"We've talked it over, and we've all decided to do what I said."
Mr Goble's hat shot off again, and gambolled away into the wings, with the stage-director bounding after it like a retriever.
"Whose idea's this?" demanded Mr Goble. His eyes were a little foggy, for his brain was adjusting itself but slowly to the novel situation.
"Mine."
"Oh, yours! I thought as much!"
"Well," said Jill, "I'll go back and tell them that you will not do what we ask. We will keep our make-up on in case you change your mind."
She turned away.
"Come back!"
Jill proceeded toward the staircase. As she went, a husky voice spoke in her ear.
"Go to it, kid! You're all right!"
The head-carpenter had broken his Trappist vows twice in a single evening, a thing which had not happened to him since the night three years ago, when, sinking wearily onto a seat in a dark corner for a bit of a rest, he found that one of his assistants had placed a pot of red paint there.
To Mr Goble, fermenting and full of strange oaths, entered Johnson Miller. The dance-director was always edgey on first nights, and during the foregoing conversation had been flitting about the stage like a white-haired moth.
"Eight twenty-five," he observed. "Time those girls were on stage."
Mr Goble, glad of a concrete target for his wrath, cursed him in about two hundred and fifty rich and well-selected words.
"Huh?" said Mr Miller, hand to ear.
Mr Goble repeated the last hundred and eleven words, the pick of the bunch.
"Can't hear!" said Mr Miller, regretfully. "Got a cold."
The grave danger that Mr Goble, a thick-necked man, would undergo some sort of a stroke was averted by the presence-of-mind of the stage-director, who, returning with the hat, presented it like a bouquet to his employer, and then his hands being now unoccupied, formed them into a funnel and through this flesh-and-blood megaphone endeavored to impart the bad news.
"The girls say they won't go on!"
Mr Miller nodded.
"I said it was time they were on."
"They're on strike!"
"It's not," said Mr Miller austerely, "what they like, it's what they're paid for. They ought to be on stage. We should be ringing up in two minutes."
The stage director drew another breath, then thought better of it. He had a wife and children, and, if dadda went under with apoplexy, what became of the home, civilization's most sacred product? He relaxed the muscles of his diaphragm, and reached for pencil and paper.
Mr Miller inspected the message, felt for his spectacle-case, found it, opened it, took out his glasses, replaced the spectacle-case, felt for his handkerchief, polished the glasses, replaced the handkerchief, put the glasses on, and read. A blank look came into his face.
"Why?" he enquired.
The stage director, with a nod of the head intended to imply that he must be patient and all would come right in the future, recovered the paper, and scribbled another sentence. Mr Miller perused it.
"Because Mae D'Arcy has got her notice?" he queried, amazed. "But the girl can't dance a step."
The stage director, by means of a wave of the hand, a lifting of both eyebrows, and a wrinkling of the nose, replied that the situation, unreasonable as it might appear to the thinking man, was as he had stated and must be faced. What, he enquired—through the medium of a clever drooping of the mouth and a shrug of the shoulders—was to be done about it?
Mr Miller remained for a moment in meditation.
"I'll go and talk to them," he said.
He flitted off, and the stage director leaned back against the asbestos curtain. He was exhausted, and his throat was in agony, but nevertheless he was conscious of a feeling of quiet happiness. His life had been lived in the shadow of the constant fear that some day Mr Goble might dismiss him. Should that disaster occur, he felt, there was always a future for him in the movies.
Scarcely had Mr Miller disappeared on his peace-making errand, when there was a noise like a fowl going through a quickset hedge, and Mr Saltzburg, brandishing his baton as if he were conducting an unseen orchestra, plunged through the scenery at the left upper entrance and charged excitedly down the stage. Having taken his musicians twice through the overture, he had for ten minutes been sitting in silence, waiting for the curtain to go up. At last, his emotional nature cracking under the strain of this suspense, he had left his conductor's chair and plunged down under the stage by way of the musician's bolthole to ascertain what was causing the delay.
"What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it?" enquired Mr Saltzburg. "I wait and wait and wait and wait and wait. … We cannot play the overture again. What is it? What has happened?"
Mr Goble, that overwrought soul, had betaken himself to the wings, where he was striding up and down with his hands behind his back, chewing his cigar. The stage director braced himself once more to the task of explanation.
"The girls have struck!"
Mr Saltzburg blinked through his glasses.
"The girls?" he repeated blankly.
 cried the stage director, his patience at last giving way. "You know what a girl is, don't you?"
"They have what?"
"Struck! Walked out on us! Refused to go on!"
Mr Saltzburg reeled under the blow.
"But it is impossible! Who is to sing the opening chorus?"
In the presence of one to whom he could relieve his mind without fear of consequences, the stage director became savagely jocular.
"That's all arranged," he said. "We're going to dress the carpenters in skirts. The audience won't notice anything wrong."
"Should I speak to Mr Goble?" queried Mr Saltzburg doubtfully.
"Yes, if you don't value your life," returned the stage director.
Mr Saltzburg pondered.
"I will go and speak to the children," he said. "I will talk to them. They know me! I will make them be reasonable."
He bustled off in the direction taken by Mr Miller, his coattails flying behind him. The stage director, with a tired sigh, turned to face Wally, who had come in through the iron pass-door from the auditorium.
"Hullo!" said Wally cheerfully. "Going strong? How's everybody at home? Fine! So am I! By the way, am I wrong or did I hear something about a theatrical entertainment of some sort here tonight?" He looked about him at the empty stage. In the wings, on the prompt side, could be discerned the flannel-clad forms of the gentlemanly members of the male ensemble, all dressed up for Mrs Stuyvesant van Dyke's tennis party. One or two of the principals were standing perplexedly in the lower entrance. The O. P. side had been given over by general consent to Mr Goble for his perambulations. Every now and then he would flash into view through an opening in the scenery. "I understood that tonight was the night for the great revival of comic opera. Where are the comics, and why aren't they opping?"
The stage director repeated his formula once more.
"The girls have struck!"
"So have the clocks," said Wally. "It's past nine."
"The chorus refuse to go on."
"No, really! Just artistic loathing of the rotten piece, or is there some other reason?"
 They've struck. That Mariner girl started it."
"She did!" Wally's interest became keener. "She would!" he said approvingly. "She's a heroine!"
"Little devil! I never liked that girl!"
"Now there," said Wally, "is just the point on which we differ. I have always liked her, and I've known her all my life. So, shipmate, if you have any derogatory remarks to make about Miss Mariner, keep them where they belong—there!" He prodded the other sharply in the stomach. He was smiling pleasantly, but the stage director, catching his eye, decided that his advice was good and should be followed. It is just as bad for the home if the head of the family gets his neck broken as if he succumbs to apoplexy.
"You surely aren't on their side?" he said.
"Me!" said Wally. "Of course I am. I'm always on the side of the down-trodden and oppressed. If you know of a dirtier trick than firing a girl just before the opening, so that they won't have to pay her two weeks' salary, mention it.  Of course I'm on the girls' side. I'll make them a speech if they want me to, or head the procession with a banner if they are going to parade down the boardwalk. I'm for 'em, Father Abraham, a hundred thousand strong. And then a few! If you want my considered opinion, our old friend Goble has asked for it and got it. And I'm glad—glad—glad, if you don't mind my quoting Pollyanna for a moment. I hope it chokes him!"
"You'd better not let him hear you talking like that!"
"An contraire, as we say in the Gay City, I'm going to make a point of letting him hear me talk like that! Adjust the impression that I fear any Goble in shining armor, because I don't. I propose to speak my mind to him. I would beard him in his lair, if he had a beard. Well, I'll clean-shave him in his lair. That will be just as good. But hist! whom have we here? Tell me, do you see the same thing I see?"
Like the vanguard of a defeated army, Mr Saltzburg was coming dejectedly across the stage.
"Well?" said the stage-director.
"They would not listen to me," said Mr Saltzburg brokenly. "The more I talked, the more they did not listen!" He winced at a painful memory. "Miss Trevor stole my baton, and then they all lined up and sang the 'Star-Spangled Banner'!"
"Not the words?" cried Wally incredulously. "Don't tell me they knew the words!"
"Mr Miller is still up there, arguing with them. But it will be of no use. What shall we do?" asked Mr Saltzburg helplessly. "We ought to have rung up half an hour ago. What shall we do-oo-oo?"
"We must go and talk to Goble," said Wally. "Something has got to be settled quick. When I left, the audience was getting so impatient that I thought he was going to walk out on us. He's one of those nasty, determined-looking men. So come along!"
Mr Goble, intercepted as he was about to turn for another walk up-stage, eyed the deputation sourly and put the same question that the stage director had put to Mr Saltzburg.
"Well?"
Wally came briskly to the point.
"You'll have to give in," he said, "or else go and make a speech to the audience, the burden of which will be that they can have their money back by applying at the box-office. These Joans of Arc have got you by the short hairs!"
"I won't give in!"
"Then give out!" said Wally. "Or pay out, if you prefer it. Trot along and tell the audience that the four dollars fifty in the house will be refunded."
Mr Goble gnawed his cigar.
"I've been in the show business fifteen years …"
"I know. And this sort of thing has never happened to you before. One gets new experiences."
Mr Goble cocked his cigar at a fierce angle, and glared at Wally. Something told him that Wally's sympathies were not wholly with him.
"They can't do this sort of thing to me," he growled.
"Well, they are doing it to someone, aren't they," said Wally, "and, if it's not you, who is it?"
"I've a damned good mind to fire them all!"
"A corking idea! I can't see a single thing wrong with it except that it would hang up the production for another five weeks and lose you your bookings and cost you a week's rent of this theatre for nothing and mean having all the dresses made over and lead to all your principals going off and getting other jobs. These trifling things apart, we may call the suggestion a bright one."
 said Mr Goble, eyeing him with distaste.
 Something sensible."
"It is a very serious situation …" began the stage director.
 said Mr Goble.
The stage director subsided into his collar.
"I cannot play the overture again," protested Mr Saltzburg. "I cannot!"
At this point Mr Miller appeared. He was glad to see Mr Goble. He had been looking for him, for he had news to impart.
"The girls," said Mr Miller, "have struck! They won't go on!"
Mr Goble, with the despairing gesture of one who realizes the impotence of words, dashed off for his favorite walk up stage. Wally took out his watch.
"Six seconds and a bit," he said approvingly, as the manager returned. "A very good performance. I should like to time you over the course in running-kit."
The interval for reflection, brief as it had been, had apparently enabled Mr Goble to come to a decision.
"Go," he said to the stage director, "and tell 'em that fool of a D'Arcy girl can play. We've got to get that curtain up."
"Yes, Mr Goble."
The stage director galloped off.
"Get back to your place," said the manager to Mr Saltzburg, "and play the overture again."
"Again!"
"Perhaps they didn't hear it the first two times," said Wally.
Mr Goble watched Mr Saltzburg out of sight. Then he turned to Wally.
"That damned Mariner girl was at the bottom of this! She started the whole thing! She told me so. Well, I'll settle her! She goes tomorrow!"
"Wait a minute," said Wally. "Wait one minute! Bright as it is, that idea is out!"
"What the devil has it got to do with you?"
"Only this, that, if you fire Miss Mariner, I take that neat script which I've prepared and I tear it into a thousand fragments. Or nine hundred. Anyway, I tear it. Miss Manner opens in New York, or I pack up my work and leave."
Mr Goble's green eyes glowed.
"Oh, you're stuck on her, are you?" he sneered. "I see!"
"Listen, dear heart," said Wally, gripping the manager's arm, "I can see that you are on the verge of introducing personalities into this very pleasant little chat. Resist the impulse!  Keep to the main issue. Does Miss Mariner open in New York or does she lot?"
There was a tense silence. Mr Goble permitted himself a swift review of his position. He would have liked to do many things to Wally, beginning with ordering him out of the theatre, but prudence restrained him. He wanted Wally's work. He needed Wally in his business: and, in the theatre, business takes precedence of personal feelings.
"All right!" he growled reluctantly.
"That's a promise," said Wally. "I'll see that you keep it." He looked over his shoulder. The stage was filled with gayly-colored dresses. The mutineers had returned to duty. "Well, I'll be getting along. I'm rather sorry we agreed to keep clear of personalities, because I should have liked to say that, if ever they have a skunk-show at Madison Square Garden, you ought to enter—and win the blue ribbon. Still, of course, under our agreement my lips are sealed, and I can't even hint at it. Good-bye. See you later, I suppose?"
Mr Goble, giving a creditable imitation of a living statue, was plucked from his thoughts by a hand upon his arm. It was Mr Miller, whose unfortunate ailment had prevented him from keeping abreast of the conversation.
"What did he say?" enquired Mr Miller, interested. "I didn't hear what he said!"
Mr Goble made no effort to inform him.
Otis Pilkington had left Atlantic City two hours after the conference which had followed the dress rehearsal, firmly resolved never to go near "The Rose of America" again. He had been wounded in his finest feelings. There had been a moment, when Mr Goble had given him the choice between having the piece rewritten and cancelling the production altogether, when he had inclined to the heroic course. But for one thing, Mr Pilkington would have defied the manager, refused to allow his script to be touched, and removed the play from his hands. That one thing was the fact that, up to the day of the dress rehearsal, the expenses of the production had amounted to the appalling sum of thirty-two thousand eight hundred and fifty-nine dollars, sixty-eight cents, all of which had to come out of Mr Pilkington's pocket. The figures, presented to him in a neatly typewritten column stretching over two long sheets of paper, had stunned him. He had had no notion that musical plays cost so much. The costumes alone had come to ten thousand six hundred and sixty-three dollars and fifty cents, and somehow that odd fifty cents annoyed Otis Pilkington as much as anything on the list. A dark suspicion that Mr Goble, who had seen to all the executive end of the business, had a secret arrangement with the costumer whereby he received a private rebate, deepened his gloom. Why, for ten thousand six hundred and sixty-three dollars and fifty cents you could dress the whole female population of New York State and have a bit left over for Connecticut. So thought Mr Pilkington, as he read the bad news in the train. He only ceased to brood upon the high cost of costuming when in the next line but one there smote his eye an item of four hundred and ninety-eight dollars for "Clothing." Clothing! Weren't costumes clothing? Why should he have to pay twice over for the same thing? Mr Pilkington was just raging over this, when something lower down in the column caught his eye. It was the words:—
Clothing … 187.45
At this Otis Pilkington uttered a stifled cry, so sharp and so anguished that an old lady in the next seat, who was drinking a glass of milk, dropped it and had to refund the railway company thirty-five cents for breakages. For the remainder of the journey she sat with one eye warily on Mr Pilkington, waiting for his next move.
This misadventure quieted Otis Pilkington down, if it did not soothe him. He returned blushingly to a perusal of his bill of costs, nearly every line of which contained some item that infuriated and dismayed him. "Shoes" ($213.50) he could understand, but what on earth was "Academy. Rehl. $105.50"? What was "Cuts … $15"? And what in the name of everything infernal was this item for "Frames," in which mysterious luxury he had apparently indulged to the extent of ninety-four dollars and fifty cents? "Props" occurred on the list no fewer than seventeen times. Whatever his future, at whatever poor-house he might spend his declining years, he was supplied with enough props to last his lifetime.
Otis Pilkington stared blankly at the scenery that fitted past the train winds. (Scenery! There had been two charges for scenery! "Friedmann, Samuel … Scenery … $3711" and "Unitt and Wickes … Scenery … $2120"). He was suffering the torments of the ruined gamester at the roulette-table. Thirty-two thousand eight hundred and fifty-nine dollars, sixty-eight cents! And he was out of pocket ten thousand in addition from the check he had handed over two days ago to Uncle Chris as his share of the investment of starting Jill in the motion-pictures. It was terrible! It deprived one of the power of thought.
The power of thought, however, returned to Mr Pilkington almost immediately: for, remembering suddenly that Roland Trevis had assured him that no musical production, except one of those elaborate girl-shows with a chorus of ninety, could possibly cost more than fifteen thousand dollars at an outside figure, he began to think about Roland Trevis, and continued to think about him until the train pulled into the Pennsylvania Station.
For a week or more the stricken financier confined himself mostly to his rooms, where he sat smoking cigarettes, gazing at Japanese prints, and trying not to think about "props" and "rehl." Then, gradually, the almost maternal yearning to see his brain-child once more, which can never be wholly crushed out of a young dramatist, returned to him—faintly at first, then getting stronger by degrees till it could no longer be resisted. True, he knew that when he beheld it, the offspring of his brain would have been mangled almost out of recognition, but that did not deter him. The mother loves her crippled child, and the author of a musical fantasy loves his musical fantasy, even if rough hands have changed it into a musical comedy and all that remains of his work is the opening chorus and a scene which the assassins have overlooked at the beginning of act two. Otis Pilkington, having instructed his Japanese valet to pack a few simple necessaries in a suitcase, took a cab to the Grand Central Station and caught an afternoon train for Rochester, where his recollection of the route planned for the tour told him "The Rose of America" would now be playing.
Looking into his club on the way, to cash a check, the first person he encountered was Freddie Rooke.
"Good gracious!" said Otis Pilkington. "What are you doing here?"
Freddie looked up dully from his reading. The abrupt stoppage of his professional career—his life-work, one might almost say—had left Freddie at a very loose end: and so hollow did the world seem to him at the moment, so uniformly futile all its so-called allurements, that, to pass the time, he had just been trying to read the National Geographic Magazine.
"Hullo!" he said. "Well, might as well be here as anywhere, what?" he replied to the other's question.
"But why aren't you playing?"
"They sacked me!" Freddie lit a cigarette in the sort of way in which the strong, silent, middle-aged man on the stage lights his at the end of act two when he has relinquished the heroine to his youthful rival. "They've changed my part to a bally Scotchman! Well, I mean to say, I couldn't play a bally Scotchman!"
Mr Pilkington groaned in spirit. Of all the characters in his musical fantasy on which he prided himself, that of Lord Finchley was his pet. And he had been burked, murdered, blotted out, in order to make room for a bally Scotchman!
"The character's called 'The McWhustle of McWhustle' now!" said Freddie sombrely.
The McWhustle of McWhustle! Mr Pilkington almost abandoned his trip to Rochester on receiving this devastating piece of information.
"He comes on in act one in kilts!"
"In kilts! At Mrs Stuyvesant van Dyke's lawn-party! On Long Island!"
"It isn't Mrs Stuyvesant van Dyke any longer, either," said Freddie. "She's been changed to the wife of a pickle manufacturer."
"A pickle manufacturer!"
"Yes. They said it ought to be a comedy part."