As Mildred Lindsey stepped out on the stage in all the glory of an almost unbelievable beauty, Mr. Godfrey Vandeford, who sat with his shoulder back of that of the author of his play, seemed to behold a vision with his trained theatrical foresight. This slender, powerful young woman, with the rose dusk of the prairie sun on her cheeks, the depths of the great canons in her dark eyes, and the breadth of the far horizons across her broad brow seemed to him to typify the rise of order in her profession, over which so long had ruled chaos. And as her rich voice led the intrigued audience from one brilliant scene to another, in which she reincarnated before their eyes a very flower of the old Southern chivalry with dash, finish, and lucidity, he felt as if he had done his best and now had a right to be allowed to depart in peace from the world of tinsel and illusion. As Lindsey and Height held the audience spell-bound while the tempted wife dueled with her might against the tender and desperate lover, placing, with a combined art that was as great as any he had ever witnessed, the "big scene" of "The Purple Slipper" among the "big scenes" of the modern stage instead of in the class of lascivious masterpieces where the night before Hawtry had laid it, Mr. Vandeford looked down into the gray eyes of the girl who had had it all in her blood for generations, and who had so brilliantly given it birth, and felt a prophecy rise within him that soon the American drama would begin to draw on the wealth of tradition which had been piling up in a vast storage for it, and that when it did, dramatists and actors, men and women, would rise to interpret it to a wondering world. "Is it really mine?" she asked him, in proud surprise and wonder. "Yes, it's yours--filtered through Howard and Rooney and all the rest, but--it--is--you," he answered. "You lost it a dozen times, but--his own comes back to a man or a woman." His eyes blazed so that the long lashes lowered over the stars in hers, and she saw the curtain fall on the last scene in a mist of tears. The onrush of applause that raised the curtain half a dozen times was confused in her by the pounding of Mr. Vandeford's heart back of her shoulder and the echo in her own. "Fifty weeks and then some, Van," she heard the young press-agent declare, in business-like congratulation. "Sure-fire hit," Mr. Rooney pronounced, as he spat on the stage floor behind the curtain. "Rehearsals at ten to-morrow to tighten up, Fido. Me for the hay." Miss Adair had gone back of the footlights to cast her gratitude into his arms, and he had failed to notice her appearance in any way at all, but had spat and gone on his autocratic way. Perhaps in the New World of the Theater, stage-managers may be able to afford to be human, perhaps not.