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“I understood,” said the zither-sweet voice, “that I was never to speak to you unless you directly asked me a question. My–“

“My soul! Have you got a name?”

“Wanda Malone.”

Potter had never heard it until that moment, but his expression showed that he considered it another outrage.

IV

The rehearsal proceeded, and under that cover old Tinker came noiselessly down the aisle and resumed his seat beside Canby, who was uttering short, broken sighs, and appeared to have been trying with fair success to give himself a shampoo.

“It’s ruined, Mr. Tinker!” he moaned, and his accompanying gesture was misleading, seeming to indicate that he alluded to his hair. “It’s all ruined if he sticks to these horrible lines he’s put in–people told me I ought to have it in my contract that nothing could be changed. I was trying to make the audience see the tragedy of egoism in my play–and how people get to hating an egoist. I made ‘Roderick Hanscom’ a disagreeable character on purpose, and–oh, listen to that!”

Miss Ellsling and Talbot Potter stood alone, near the front of the stage. “Why do you waste such goodness on me, Roderick?” Miss Ellsling was inquiring. “It is noble and I feel that I am unworthy of you.”

“No, Mildred, believe me,” Potter read from his manuscript, “I would rather decline the nomination and abandon my career, and go to live in some quiet spot far from all this, than that you should know one single moment’s unhappiness, for you mean far more to me than worldly success.” He kissed her hand with reverence, and lifted his head slowly, facing the audience with rapt gaze; his wonderful smile–that ineffable smile of abnegation and benignity–just beginning to dawn.

Coming from behind him, and therefore unable to see his face, Miss Wanda Malone advanced in her character of ingenue, speaking with an effect of gayety: “Now what are you two good people conspiring about?”

Potter stamped the floor; there was wrenched from him an incoherent shriek containing fragments of profane words and ending distinguishably with: “It’s that Missmiss again!”

Packer impelled himself upon Miss Malone, pushing her back. “No, no, no!” he cried. “Count ten! Count ten before you come down with that speech. You mustn’t interrupt Mr. Potter, Miss–Miss–“

“It was my cue,” she said composedly, showing her little pamphlet of typewritten manuscript. “Wasn’t I meant to speak on the cue?”

Talbot Potter recovered himself sufficiently to utter a cry of despair: “And these are the kind of people an artist must work with!” He lifted his arms to heaven, calling upon the high gods for pity; then, with a sudden turn of fury, ran to the back of the stage and came mincing forward evidently intending saturnine mimicry, repeating the ingenue’s speech in a mocking falsetto: “Now what are you two good people conspiring about?” After that he whirled upon her, demanding with ferocity: “You’ve got something you can think with in your head, haven’t you, Missmiss? Then what do you think of that?”

Miss Malone smiled, and it was a smile that would have gone a long way at a college dance. Here, it made the pitying company shudder for her. “I think it’s a silly, makeshift sort of a speech,” she said cheerfully, in which opinion the unhappy playwright out in the audience hotly agreed. “It’s a bit of threadbare archness, and if I were to play Miss Lyston’s part, I’d be glad to have it changed!”

Potter looked dazed. “Is it your idea,” he said in a ghostly voice, “that I was asking for your impression of the dramatic and literary value of that line?”

She seemed surprised. “Weren’t you?”

It was too much for Potter. He had brilliant and unusual powers of expression, but this was beyond them. He went to the chair beside the little table, flung himself upon it, his legs outstretched, his arms dangling inert, and stared haggardly upward at nothing.

Packer staggered into the breach. “You interrupted the smile, Miss–Mi–“