A strange thing was this theatrical business--the business of selling emotions! One had really to feel the emotions, in order to portray them with force; yet one had at the same time to appraise them with the eye of the business-man--one must not feel emotions that would not pay. Also, one boomed and boosted his own particular emotions, celebrating their merits in the language of the circus-poster. If you had taken up a certain play, you considered it the greatest play that had ever made its bow to Broadway; and you actually persuaded yourself to believe it--at least those who made the real successes were men who possessed that hypnotic power. There was, for instance, Mr. Rosenberg, the press-agent and advertising-man. He was certain that “The Genius” was a play of genius, and its author a man of genius; and yet Thyrsis knew that if it had been Meyer and Levinson, across the street, who were producing it, Mr. Rosenberg would have called it “rot”. Mr. Rosenberg was to Thyrsis a living embodiment of Moses Rosen in the play--so much so that he felt the resemblance in the names to be perilous, and winced every time he heard Rosenberg speak of Rosen. But fortunately neither Rosenberg nor Rosen possessed a sense of irony, and so there were no feelings hurt. Thyrsis had written the play without having met either a press-agent or the head of a music-bureau; he had drawn the character of Moses after the fashion of the German, evolving the idea of an elephant out of his inner consciousness. But now that it was done, he was amazed to see how well it was done; he was like an astronomer who works out the orbit of a new planet, and afterwards discovers it with his telescope. As the preparations neared completeness, Thyrsis found himself more and more disturbed about the production. He was able to judge of the actors now, and they seemed to him to be cheap actors--to be relying for their effects upon exaggeration, to be making the play into a farce. But when he pointed this out to Mr. Tapping, Mr. Tapping was offended; and when he spoke to Mr. Jones, he was referred to Miss Lewis. All he could accomplish with Miss Lewis, however, was to bring up the eternal question of the lack of “charm” in her part. Poor Ethelynda was also getting into an unhappy frame of mind; she had begun to doubt whether the “drama of ideas” was her _forte_ after all--and whether the ideas in this particular drama were real ideas or sham. She got the habit of inviting friends in to judge it, and she was always of the opinion of the last friend; so the production was like a ship whose pilot has lost his bearings. The time drew near for the opening-performance, which was to be given in a manufacturing city in New England. The nerves of all the company were stretched to the breaking point; and overwrought as he was himself, Thyrsis could not but pity the unhappy “leading lady”, who could hardly keep herself together, even with the drugs he saw her taking.