"I do," answered Miss Lindsey. "And it is curious that with all its changes it is still--still yours. There is a lot more of your stuff left than you realize, and the turns that--that Mr. Vandeford's playwright has given it are very clever. Lots of times he's just paraphrased your lines into Hawtryites. It will be interesting to see how much of you is left when we all come out of the wash for the first night." "I wish I were dead and buried!" she was surprised to hear Miss Adair confess, and there then ensued a downpour, which the hardier Western girl weathered for very love of the young Southern tempest in her arms. "I suppose I ought to go home, out of the way, but I'm going to stay and--and learn--and write another one all by myself," she finally sobbed, with returning courage, thus comforting herself with the resolve which every playwright who ever built a play has used to keep from going entirely mad during the rehearsals of his first play. "Just try to live until the New York opening, and then see how you feel. That is the way actors do to keep going during the awful grilling of the rehearsals and the road try-out," advised Miss Lindsey, with great soothing. "I will," promised Miss Adair, and turned her face on her pillow, to sleep, while Miss Lindsey took herself and her jar of cold-cream into her own cell. "I wish I had a chance at that play! What'll she do when she sees Hawtry and Height really in action in some of those scenes?" she murmured into her own pillow. The next morning Miss Adair rose, donned a most lovely home-spun linen gown, which was of an old ivory hue and which had been spun upon the looms of her great-great-great grandmother by that lady's slaves, crowned this toilet with the floppy hat covered with crushed roses she and Miss Lindsey and Mr. Farraday had purchased, and reported herself about an hour late at the rehearsals of "The Purple Slipper," whose authorship she had repudiated. She seated herself in the dusk of the left stage-box and bared her breast for blows. They came fast and furious, but other breasts and heads beside her own suffered. Mr. William Rooney was in full action. The entire company was on the stage in the midst of the last ensemble bit in the first act, all talking and acting with blue booklets of lines in their hands. "Here you, Mr. Kent," roared Mr. Rooney as he rose from behind his table, at one side of which sat faithful Fido annotating his copy of the manuscript, "make up to that old lady like she was the last ham sandwich extinct and you knew you were going to be fed on alfalfa the rest of your life. Get her going, man, get her going! She's an old fool, and you know it, but you've got to have her plantation and slaves. You can keep a chorus-girl car in the garage if you just get her well fooled. Fool along, fool along!"