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Jimmie had a great deal to do with the rehearsals. Several times he challenged Ursula’s reading of the part.

“You must not give your kisses with such ease,” he told her upon one occasion; “the girl in the play has never been kissed.”

She shrugged her shoulders and ignored him. Again he remonstrated. “She’s frank and free,” he said. “Make her that. Make her that. Men must fight for her favors.”

She came to it at last, helped by that Rosalind-like quality in herself. She was young, as he had wanted Elise to be, clean-hearted, joyous–girlhood at its best.

Gradually Jimmie ceased to suggest. He would sit beside us in the dimness of the empty auditorium, and watch her as if he drank her in. Now and then he would laugh a little, and say, under his breath: “How did I ever write it? How did it ever happen?”

Elise, on the other side of him, said, at last, “I knew you could do it, Jimmie.”

“You thought I could do great things. You never knew I could do–this–“

It was toward the end of the month that Duncan said to me one night as we rode home on the top of a ‘bus, “You don’t suppose that he–“

“Elise thinks it,” I said. “It’s waking her up.”

Elise and Jimmie had been married fifteen years, and had never had a honeymoon, not in the sense that Jimmie wanted it–an adventure in romance, to some spot where they could forget the world of work, the world of sordid things, the world that was making Jimmie old. Every summer Jimmie had asked for it, and always Elise had said, “Wait.”

But now it was Elise who began to plan. “When your play is produced, we’ll run away somewhere. Do you remember the place you always talked about–up in the hills?”

He looked at her through his round glasses. “I can’t get away from this”–he waved his hand toward the stage.

“If it’s a success you can, Jimmie.”

“It will be a success. Ursula Simms is a wonder. Look at her, Elise. Look at her!”

Duncan and I could look at nothing else. As many times as I had seen her in the part, I came to it always eagerly. It was her great scene–where the girl, breaking free from all that has bound her, takes the hand of her vagabond lover and goes forth, leaving behind wealth and a marriage of distinction, that she may wander across the moors and down on the sands, with the wild wind in her face, the stars for a canopy!

It tugged at our hearts. It would tug, we knew, at the heart of any audience. It was the human nature in us all which responded. Not one of us but would have broken bonds. Oh, youth, youth! Is there anything like it in the whole wide world?

I do not think that it tugged at the heart of Elise. Her heart was not like that. It was a stay-at-home heart. A workaday-world heart. Elise would never under any circumstance have gone forth with a vagabond on a wild night.

But here was Ursula doing it every day. On the evening of the first dress-rehearsal she wore clothes that showed her sense of fitness. As if in casting off conventional restraints, she renounced conventional attire; she came down to her lover wrapped in a cloak of the deep-purple bloom of the heather of the moor, and there was a pheasant’s feather in her cap.

“May you never regret it, my dear, my dear,” said the lover on the stage.

“I shall love you for a million years,” said Ursula, and we felt that she would, and that love was eternal, and that any woman might have it if she would put her hand in her lover’s and run away with him on a wild night!

And it was the genius of Jimmie Harding that made us feel that the thing could be done. He sat forward in his chair, his arms on the back of the seat in front of him. “Jove!” he kept saying under his breath. “It’s the real thing. It’s the real thing–“