Claire has a beautiful figure, and she moves very well. But I do not know that she has any particular claim to expert knowledge about Eastern women. However, there she was, in her own house, and of course everybody looked at her while she gravely walked up and down--everybody, that is to say, except Sallie, who was ostentatiously lighting a cigarette. “You see what I mean?” said Claire, but she was wise enough not to say it to Sallie, who quite obviously neither wished nor intended to see. Of course it was Mrs. Fazackerly who murmured, “Oh yes--how well you do it!” and then Claire sat down again, her insistent egoism satisfied for the moment. “I should like to go through the whole of the first scene again,” said Bill Patch, looking harassed. “We haven’t settled anything yet about Puppa’s Hessian boots,” one of the Kendals reproachfully observed. “They come in later. Ivan Petruski Skivah will wear them. That’s Martyn. And I _should_ like to know, if possible, whether you can undertake Abdul the Bulbul Ameer, Major Ambrey?” “Dear me, haven’t you settled that yet?” Mrs. Kendal asked, in amicable surprise. “I should have thought the parts would have been settled long ago. We seem to be getting on very _slowly_, don’t we?” I agreed with her and called upon Christopher to make up his mind. To my surprise, he did not utter the uncompromising refusal that I had expected. He only said that if Patch would take his oath not to ask him to sing anything by himself, or speak a single line, or do anything of that sort, he’d think about it. “But Abdul is the chief character in the piece. I can’t very well make him deaf and dumb,” expostulated the author. “Well, then, some other chap had better take it on. I should only make a mull of it.” I heard Nancy Fazackerly softly protesting at this, and Christopher crossed over to the piano, where she had been patiently sitting all the afternoon. “I’ll turn over the pages for you,” he suggested, and he remained standing behind her head, looking down at the pale gold knot of her hair and saying “Now?” anxiously at short intervals. The tune of “Abdul the Bulbul Ameer” rattled through the room again and again, and Martyn and Sallie and Alfred and Amy all sang it, and General Kendal boomed his usual accompaniment of some rather indeterminate monosyllable repeated over and over again. All the rehearsals seem to me now to have been very much alike. Bill Patch was always gay and light-hearted and more or less distracted, and Mrs. Fazackerly was always good-tempered and obliging--and almost always untruthful, when appealed to on any question of conflicting opinions. Sallie Ambrey was always competent, and her acting was very clever. So was Martyn’s. Eventually, they made Bill Patch play the villain’s part himself, after Christopher Ambrey had declined it. “I’d rather turn over the pages for the orchestra,” said Christopher, and the orchestra smiled at him gratefully in the person of Mrs. Fazackerly.