John stood, wondering. As rehearsals progressed, his wonder grew into bewilderment. Miss Dounay treated the whole company cavalierly, but she treated him disdainfully. Her feeling for the others was simply negative; for him it appeared to be positive. As an actress, it developed that she was "up" in the part of Isabel, having played it many times. She had, moreover, ideas of how every other part should be played and was pleased to express them. Nobody protested, Halson least of all. She was a "find" for the People’s. As a director, too, Miss Dounay was masterful. A languid glance, a single word, a very slight intonation, had more force than one of Halson’s ranting commands. And she was instinctively competent. Hampstead, despite his own sad experience, watched her open-mouthed. This young woman, it appeared, was an intellectual force as well as a magnetic one. She cut speeches or interpolated them, altered business, and in one instance rearranged an entire scene, while in another she boldly reconstructed the conclusion of an act. The storm center round which much of this cutting, slicing, and fattening took place was Hampstead. She heckled him unmercifully about the reading of his lines, ridiculed his gestures, and badgered him to madness. On the fourth day of this, John moped out of the theater, head down, reflecting bitterly upon the illusory character of woman, of which he knew so little,—moped so slowly that Parks overtook him on the first corner. "This woman is a friend of yours," Parks proposed tentatively. "I thought she was," sighed Hampstead weakly, "but she keeps cutting my speeches. By the end of the week, I won’t have any part left at all." Parks indulged a self-satisfied chuckle at the keenness of his own discernment. "Don’t you see," he explained, "she’s cutting the stuff you do badly. She took away from you a situation in which you were awkward and unreal. She changed that scene around and left you with a climax in which you are positively graceful as well as forceful. You’ll get a big hand in it. She studies you. I’ve watched her." "Old man," blurted Hampstead, with sudden fervor, "it would make me the happiest man in the world if I thought that you were right. But you are wrong, and her badgering has begun to get on my nerves. Say!" and he interrupted himself to ask a question not yet answered to his satisfaction. "Why is she here?—with the People’s, I mean?" "You’ve heard the stories," answered Parks, with a shrug. "However, I doubt if it’s any mere whim. She appears to me to have a cool, good reason for anything she does." Parks turns off at Ninth Street, and John moved on down Market. "A cold good reason for what she does," he murmured. "What’s the answer, I wonder, to what she does to me?" As the days went on, John’s wonder grew.