At the moment of Brainard’s arrival this morning, little Margaret Leroy, who, for the lack of a better actress, was their present leading lady, was languidly reciting Cordelia’s lines: No blown ambition doth our arms incite, But love, dear love, and our aged father’s rights, In a few moments a voice with a beery tang boomed forth heavily into the dusky auditorium: Aye, every inch a king; When I do stare, see how the subject quakes! At this point Brainard had his first misgivings. Perhaps, with their present company, _Lear_ was overambitious. It gave him a pang to realize that the faded little Leroy, with her childish blond wig, was the best actress they could secure. She had had a quarrel with her manager at the opening of the season, because he wanted to send her to Omaha, in somebody else’s last season’s success, and had accepted the offer of the People’s Theater in a fit of pique, and with obvious reluctance. “It queers one so with the profession,” she had told Farson confidentially. She had insisted upon bringing along with her that ancient idol of the matinée, Dudley Warner. He was doing _Lear_ in the style of _Beau Brummel_, in which he had made his last tour on the road. As Brainard listened to the shrill pipings of Cordelia answered by Warner’s beery bass, his heart sank. He recalled all the rebuffs he had received from the better players whom he had approached—their insincere and voluble sympathy, their flimsy excuses, and the selfish fears that kept them from offending Einstein & Flukeheimer, in spite of the generous salaries and all the other temptations Brainard could think of to win them to the cause of art. “Maybe your gold mine will give out, or you will get tired of the stage,” one well-known actress had said to him pertly. “Anyway, Einstein has promised to put me on in one of Dudu Smith’s plays, and that’s good enough for me!” The People’s would have to do the best they could with second-rate and third-rate people until they had “made good,” or could train their own actors, Brainard reflected. Meanwhile Miss Leroy continued to pipe and Dudley Warner to bawl, interrupted now and then by MacNaughton’s resonant voice from the wings “No, no! That won’t do at all. Begin that once more, Miss Leroy,” etc. “Ah, it’s rotten! Cut it out!” a voice murmured out of the darkness close to Brainard. The fresh young voice so near to him startled Brainard, and he turned to see who had spoken. In the gloom he could make out a girl sitting hunched up, with crossed legs, a newspaper on her lap, from which she seemed to be eating her luncheon. “It _is_ pretty rotten,” Brainard admitted. “The whole bunch is no account trash, anyway,” the young person continued impersonally, dangling a slice of sausage before her mouth. “Like last year’s grass or yesterday’s supper. But that Jenny! Why, she couldn’t decorate a cemetery properly!”