"Yes, her heart ... she is very weak." He did whatever I suggested on that explanation. I would have proposed putting her to bed if I had not feared that that would involve more revelations of the family disorder than I was willing to tax him with. We got her out of her faintness presently and found her a safety valve in pitying her poor children with that sloppy sort of maternal affection which is not inconsistent with a good deal of neglect. I wasn't working for anything but to save Jerry--I came to call him that before many weeks--from the embarrassment of what I was sure had been a family fracas which threatened at every moment to break out again. I suggested tea, for I was satisfied that both of them wanted food, and while I was making toast before the sitting-room fire, Mrs. McDermott managed to get herself and the children into some sort of order. I could see then how pretty she had been in a large-eyed, short-lipped way, and how charming in her youth had been the inconsequence which as the mistress of a family made her a sloven. Not to seem to notice too much the superficial air of being prepared for company which she managed to give the children by washing their faces surreptitiously, I explained to Mr. McDermott that I had come about the part of _Mrs. Brandis_. "Oh, you'll do," he assented heartily. "You'll do just as you are. _Mrs. Brandis_ is a widow you know ... that is, the _Mrs. Brandis_ that I created----" "Just as you conceived it of course," I insisted, "I should want to play it that way." "The trouble is that Moresco isn't satisfied so easily; he wants me to make changes in the part." "Well ..." I was prepared to make concessions. "I'm afraid he has somebody in mind ..." "Fancy Filette," his wife broke in, "a painting, flirting, immoral!..." Jerry scraped his chair back along the floor to cover the word, but I knew where I was in a twinkling. "Fancy Filette! She'll play it in short skirts!" "I'll be lucky if she doesn't insist on a song and dance." "He doesn't need to have her unless he wants to." Mrs. McDermott was positive on that point. She was sitting with both children on her lap, chiefly in order to keep up the fiction that I didn't know she had just been having hysterics, I had cautioned her against letting them climb over her, and she promptly let them, because the idea that she was tending them at a risk to her health, rather helped out with her own notion of herself as a misused but devoted wife and mother. Jerry looked at me over her head in a mute appeal to me to understand. "Unless Moresco puts on my play there is no chance for it," he protested. "I've been to the others. I'll tell you, though, if you go to him just as you are, he may think better of it. He can't possibly get anybody so good."