Mr. Tapping had talked the problems out with him at the beginning--talking until two o’clock in the morning, in a super-heated office filled with the smoke of ten thousand dead cigars. He talked swiftly, eagerly, setting forth his ideas; to Thyrsis it was a most curious experience--to hear the vision of his inmost soul translated into the language of the Tenderloin! “Your fiddler’s this kind of a guy,” Mr. Tapping would say--“he knows he’s got the goods, and he don’t care whether those old fogies think he’s dippy, or what the hell they think. Ain’t that the dope, Mr. Author?” And Thyrsis would answer faintly that he thought that was “the dope.”--This was a word that Mr. Tapping used every time he opened his mouth, apparently; it designated all things connected with the play--character, dialogue, action, scenery, music, costume. “That’s the way to dope it out to them!” he would cry to the actors. Miss Lewis, and Mr. Tilford, the leading man, moved through their parts with dignity; the stage director showed them the “business” he had laid out, but they did not trouble to act at rehearsals, and he did not criticize what they did. But all the other people had to be taught their roles and drilled in them; and that meant that Mr. Tapping had to have in him five actors and two actresses, and play all their seven parts as they came. Marvellous it was to see him do this; springing from place to place, and changing his whole aspect in a flash--now scolding shrewishly in the words of Violet Hartman, now discoursing, with the accent and manner of Prof, von Arne, upon the _psychopathia_ _sexualis_ of Genius. He did not know all the parts, of course; but that was never allowed to trouble him. He would take a sentence out of the actor’s lips, and then go on to elaborate it in his Tenderloin dialect; or, if the scene was highly emotional, and required swift speech, he would fall back upon the phrase “and so and so, and so and so.” He could run the whole gamut of human emotions with those words, “and so and so.” “No, that’s no good!” he would cry to “Mrs. Hartman.” “What are those words?--‘Wretched, ungrateful son--do you care nothing at all for your parents’ feelings? Do you owe us nothing for what we have done? And so and so? And so and so? And so and so?’” Mr. Tapping’s voice would rise to a wail; and then in a flash he would turn to Moses Rosen (he called all the actors by their character-names). “That’s your cue, Rosen, you rush in left centre, and throw up your hands--right here--see? And what’s your dope?--oh yes--‘I have spent seven thousand dollars on this thing! You have ruined me! You have betrayed me! And so and so! And so and so! And so and so!’--And then you run over here to the professor--‘You have trapped me! And so and so!’”