“What’s this about a partnership?” she said softly. “I couldn’t help hearing.” “Don’t ask me,” said Will in tones hushed as cautiously. “Mr. Flippance did speak of it, but I’ve never thought of the theatre as a business, only as a spree.” “Did he want you to take a theatre?” she asked anxiously. “Good heavens, no! He called it hell!” Miss Flippance smiled sadly. “That’s his way of consoling himself. He’s dying to get a stock company again. But he _mustn’t_ have even a theatre for amateurs. I’d fight it tooth and nail.” “It’s bad for him, I know.” “It’s bad for _me_,” said Miss Flippance. She puffed out a cloud. “You see, there’d be no place for me. I can wipe most actresses off the stage, but I’m not pretty—at least, not since my illness—and the public won’t have me—except at the piano where I turn my back on them. Plain actresses must be heard and not seen.” “Oh!” Will was taken aback by such candour. “Besides, one of the women would probably entangle him into marriage. I don’t mind his having a wife on wires!” And a smile came travelling over the pits of her face. “You don’t mean to say he really wants to go back to hell?” said Will, dazed. “Don’t the moths after you’ve saved ’em from the lamp? And it was no easy task saving him. Christmas after Christmas I used to jest: ‘Peace and goodwill indeed! You’ll never have peace till you’ve got rid of your goodwill.’” “But that’s what he says himself,” said Will naïvely. “So he can’t be craving to go back—it’s the marionettes he wanted me to stand in with.” “That’s all my eye. He don’t know how happy he really is nowadays, playing all the men’s parts. That was always the trouble in a real theatre, especially when he was cock-of-the-walk—he never could make up his mind which part he wanted. First he’d try one, and then think another was better and throw it up in the middle and take away the other man’s part. Nobody likes to give up a half-digested part, and it doesn’t make things easier when, after all, you get it back again. Imagine the ructions he was always making, and I’m not going to have it all over again. He’s got _all_ the parts now, and so it’s going to stay.” With which ultimatum she held out her hand and gripped him with what he felt a manly clasp, and an honest. “Don’t you be his partner,” she counselled. “He’s lost all his own money and it’s not likely he’d multiply yours. He might have been a big London actor or manager, but the Bible sized him up before he was born. ‘Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel.’ If only at least one can _keep_ him to water! No, you stick to your cash. There’s no money in the show for more than him and me—my last jewellery will have to go for the horse—and if you’ve really got the dollars, he’d have a theatre, with you as juvenile lead, before you could say Jack Robinson, and then he’d steal your part and drive you to drink.”