What came demanded further patience on her part and increased Elsie's infatuation. Before the end of the week the young actress had an offer from a rival establishment which would take her to the edge of summer at a salary that fairly made her gasp. The second theatre was perhaps a shade better, but not sufficiently so to reconcile Miss Pritchard to it. But she held her peace. Whereupon the first manager increased the sum offered by his rival, and, Miss Pritchard still tolerant, Elsie agreed to remain there until June. CHAPTER XXIX Miss Pritchard acknowledged to herself that Elsie Marley had the right stuff in her. She did not grow careless, never let herself down. The audience was uncritical and wildly demonstrative, but the girl did her level best at every performance. Up to a certain point, she even improved. The possibility of so doing in this case was limited, but having reached that point she held it. Further, her wonderfully sweet voice seemed to grow sweeter every day. Therein lay Miss Pritchard's one hope. Presently, she sought out an old friend who had been a musician of note and later a teacher and musical critic on an evening paper, and confided her difficulty to him. Hearing her story, he was interested and very sympathetic. He advised her to drop the concert idea and dwell wholly upon the possibility of opera as a lure: only the dramatic form and setting could compete successfully in a case of stage-fever like that. And where Miss Pritchard had hoped only to be allowed to bring Elsie to him, he being an old man, he agreed to go to the theatre and hear the girl when she would be off her guard. "I'll go any night you say, Miss Pritchard," he proposed. "Don't make _me_ choose, Mr. Francis," she begged. "There's so much at stake that if I knew when you were to be there, I should be so nervous I couldn't sit still." "You _nervous_, Miss Pritchard!" he exclaimed incredulously. "Alas, yes, Mr. Francis," she acknowledged, laughing. "These young people with their careers are too stimulating for spinster cousins who have never had anything more exciting than night-work on a city paper. Well, I dare say I have only my come-uppings. You see, I was afraid Elsie wouldn't be lively enough! I had visions of an extremely proper, blase young person moping about, and rather dreaded her. Getting Elsie was like finding a changeling." "Rather too much of a good thing? Well, we're all that way, Miss Pritchard. If we're looking for a quiet person, we want a peculiar sort of quietude; and the lively ones must be just so lively and no more. Do you remember in one of the old novels, where a sister enumerates in a letter to her brother the charms of the young lady she wishes him to marry? At the end of the list she adds that the lady has 'just as much religion as my William likes.' Now isn't that human nature and you and I all over?"