Money! Yet hadn’t she excuse? She feared poverty, having known it. Poverty, for her, was not a question of what would happen to an income of a thousand a year if the income tax went up; it was Jackman’s Buildings and the Staithley streets. If she could help it, she was not going back to poverty. To Staithley perhaps she would go back: she was indeed fixed in her idea to go back, to buy, with her stage-made wealth, a house in Staithley like Walter Pate’s and to be rich in Staithley. So far, in her journeyings, she had seen no place like Staithley: either there was flatness which depressed her, or hills which were too urbane, or too low, too much like mounds in a park to be worthy of the name of hills. The stage was a means to an end, and the end was Staithley, a house of her own, an independence--and her present salary was thirty-five shillings a week, less ten per cent to Chown! She was, at any rate, thrifty with it, seeing no need, on tour, with her contract in her pocket, to revise her wardrobe in the direction of effectiveness and keeping her nose too closely to the grindstone Darley held to have time for money-spending in other ways. She watched with satisfaction her Post Office Savings Bank account increase by a weekly ten shillings. Darley relented and came back next day with the Maisie part in “The Girl from Honolulu” in his pocket. “Damn her,” he thought, “she’s honest about it and there have been avaricious artists. Avarice and Art aren’t contradictory.” He expected no more at their parting than the cool “Good-by” she gave him. “Full of possibilities,” he reported her to Drayton, and when Drayton asked him to be more definite, “I can’t,” he wrote, “be more definite than this. You know those Chinese toys consisting of a box within a box of beautiful wood, wonderfully made? You marvel at the workmanship and you open box after box. You get tired and you go on opening because each box is beautiful and because of a faint hope you have that there’ll be something in the last box. I don’t know what’s in hers. That’s her secret and her mystery, and, by the way, you can discount what Pettigrew is going to tell you of her Maisie. It isn’t her Maisie. It’s mine. I’ve rehearsed her in it.” “Darley’s mad about her,” Drayton interpreted this to Rossiter. Darley was, anyhow, sufficiently interested to travel across half England to see her play Maisie on her first Saturday night, in Liverpool. He stood at the side of the circle where he could watch both her and the house, and he waited, especially for a scene which was one of the weaknesses of the piece, when Maisie, by sheer blague, has to subdue a rascally beachcomber who intends robbery. He wasn’t afraid of her song, but this scene called for acting; it wasn’t plausible, even for musical comedy, unless Maisie carried it off _con brio_.