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“I see,” said Potter grimly. “You engaged her to please your father.”

“Oh, Mr. Potter!” the stage-manager protested. “If you don’t like her–“

“That will do!” Potter cut him off, and paced the floor, virulently brooding. “And so Talbot Potter’s company is to be made up of actors engaged to suit the personal whims of L. Smith Packer’s father, old Mister Packer of Baptist Ridge, near Seeleyville, Pennsylvania!”

“But, Mr. Potter, if you don’t–“

“I said that would DO!” roared Potter. “Good-night!”

“Good-night, sir,” said the stage-manager humbly, and humbly got himself out of the room, to be heard, an instant later, bidding the Japanese an apologetic good-night at the outer door of the apartment.

Canby rose to take his own departure, promising to have the new dialogue “worked out” by morning.

“He is, too!” said Potter, not heeding the playwright, but confirming an unuttered thought in his own mind. He halted at the table, where he had set his tiny glass, and gulped the emerald at a swallow. “I always thought he was!”

“Was what?” inquired old Tinker.

“A hypocrite!”

“D’you mean Packer?” said Tinker incredulously.

“He’s a hypocrite!” Potter shouted fiercely. “And I shouldn’t be surprised if his father was another! Widower! I never saw the man in my life, but I’d swear it on oath! He is a hypocrite! Packer’s father is a damned old Baptist hypocrite!”

VIII

With this sonorous bit of character reading still ringing in his ears, Canby emerged from the cream-coloured apartment to find the stoop-shouldered figure of the also hypocritical son leaning wearily against the wall, waiting for a delaying elevator. The attitude was not wholly devoid of pathos, to Canby’s view of it. Neither was the careworn, harried face, unharmoniously topped by a green hat so sparklingly jaunty, not only in colour but in its shape and the angle of its perch, that it was outright hilarious, and, above the face of Packer, made the playwright think pityingly of a St. Patrick’s Day party holding a noisy celebration upon a hearse.

Its wearer nodded solemnly as the elevator bounced up, flashing, and settled to the level of the floor; but the quick drop through the long shaft seemed to do the stage-manager a disproportionate amount of good. Halfway down he emitted a heavy “Whew!” of relief and threw back his shoulders. He seemed to swell, to grow larger; lines verged into the texture of his face, disappearing; and with them went care and seeming years. Canby had casually taken him to be about forty, but so radical was the transformation of him that, as the distance from his harrowing overlord increased, the playwright beheld another kind of creature. In place of the placative, middle-aged varlet, troubled and hurrying to serve, there stepped out of the elevator, at the street level, a deep-chested, assertive, manly adventurer, about thirty, kindly eyed, picturesque, and careless. The green hat belonged to him perfectly.

He gave Canby a look of burlesque ruefulness over his shoulder, the comedy appeal of one schoolboy to another as they leave a scolding teacher on the far side of the door. “The governor does keep himself worked up!” he laughed, as they reached the street and paused. “If it isn’t one thing, it’s some thing!”

“Perhaps it’s my play just now,” said Canby. “I was afraid, earlier this evening, he meant to drop it. Making so many changes may have upset his nerves.”

“Lord bless your soul! No!” exclaimed the new Packer. “His nerves are all right! He’s always the same! He can’t help it!”

“I thought possibly he might have been more upset than usual,” Canby said. “There was a critic or something that–“

“No, no, Mr. Canby!” Packer chuckled. “New plays and critics, they don’t worry him any more than anything else. Of course he isn’t going to be pleased with any critics. Most of them give him splendid notices, but they don’t please him. How could they?”

“He’s always the same, you think?” Canby said blankly.