"Everybody's a type. A man or a woman starts out being one kind of type, and sticks right there. Dramatists write parts for types, and managers go out and hire types for the parts. Sometimes they can't find the right type and then there's another expensive production taking a trip to its eternal rest in the storehouse. I don't know whose fault it is--I only know it's not mine. It's hell--that's what it is--simply hell!" Gloom choked Verba. He stared moodily ahead of him, where the broad of a wide, blue-ginghamed back showed above the draped tops of the next row of seats but one. Suddenly he smote his hands together. "Bateman!" he exclaimed. "Old Bird Bateman!" Up from behind the next row of seats but one rose a chorelady with her nose in the air and her clenched fists on the places where her hips should have been--if she had any hips. "I beg your par-r-don?" she inquired, quivering with a grand, indignant politeness; "was you referrin' to me as an ould boid?" "Madam," said Verba, "resume your pleasures. I wasn't thinking of you." "Thin why was you lookin' at me whin you said it? You may be the owner of this bum dump, f'r all I care, but job or no job, let me tell you this, young man--there's no black Prowtestant Jew alive kin call me out of me own name an'----" "Oh, shut up," said Verba, without heat. He got on his feet. "Come on, Offutt, the lady thinks I'm trying to flirt with her and between the three of us, we're breaking up rehearsals. Let's get out--I've got an idea." In the half light his eyes shone like a cat's. Outside, on the hot pavement, he took Offutt by the lapels of his coat. "Boy," he said, "did you ever hear of Burton Bateman--better known as Old Bird Bateman?" Offutt shook his head. "Never did," he confessed. "You're too young at this game to remember, I guess," said Verba. "Well, then, did you ever hear of the Scudder Stock Company?" "Of course I've heard of that," said Offutt. "It was long before my time though." "It was long before everybody's time," assented Verba. "Ten years is the same as a century on this street. But twenty-five years ago Burt Bateman played leads with the Scudder Stock Company--yes; and played juveniles and walking gentlemen and friends of the family and long-lost heirs and Dutchmen and Irishmen and niggers--played high-comedy parts and low-comedy parts--played anything there was to play. "He wasn't one of your single-barrelled modern types and none of your old-time ranting scenery-biters either; he was an actor. If he'd come along a little later they'd have made a star out of him and probably ruined him. You'd have remembered him then. But he never was a star. He never was featured even. He just kept right on being an actor. And gee, how he could eat up an old man's part!" "You speak of him as though he were dead," said Offutt.