of his family, dressmakers. 'Ah! Teresa! Teresa!' sighed Sir Henry, gazing at the portrait of that lady. 'It needs your touch, your charm, the quick insight into the health of the theatre which only comes to those who have been born in it.' Soon the Imperium would close for a short holiday, after a shockingly bad season, and its manager had to make up his mind as to his new production. Mr Gillies was all for safety and economy, and for postponing any adventure to the Spring, but Sir Henry said,-- 'The fate of the whole year is decided in October. The few people who matter come back from Karlsbad and Scotland cleaned up and scraped, and it is then that you make your impression. The Spring is too late. We must have something new.' 'We've got nothing new.' 'This fellow Mann.' 'But! He's mad. If he walked into the Club half the men would walk out of it.' 'He has made himself felt.' 'Yes. But in the wrong way.' 'The wrong way is often the right way in the end.' 'You can't have him in the theatre, Chief, after the way he has talked about us, as though none of us knew our business.' 'He might say so if he saw our balance-sheet,' said Sir Henry, who loved nothing so much as teasing his loyal subordinates. 'We've nothing but this melodrama of Halford Bunn's in which I should have to play the Pope.' 'Well, you were a great success as a Cardinal, Chief.' 'Hm! Hm! Yes.' Sir Henry began to live again through the success of _The Cardinal's Niece_, but also he remembered the horrible time he had had at rehearsals with Mr Halford Bunn who would get so drunk with his own words that any acting which distracted attention from them drove him almost into hysterics. Sir Henry laughed. 'Bunn or Mann.... Said Mr Mann to Mr Bunn, "I hope you've got a record run." Said Mr Bunn to Mr Mann, "You, sir, are but an also ran."' 'Ha! ha! ha!' laughed the manager. 'He! he! he!' laughed Sir Henry, and they parted without having solved their problem, though the impishness in Sir Henry made him long to infuriate both Bunn and Mann by a merger of his contracts with the two of them.... Oh! dear. Oh, dear, authors had always been trial enough, but if artists were going to begin to thrust their inflated egoism into the machinery of the theatre then the life of its manager would become unbearable.... Sir Henry liked to drift and to make sudden and surprising decisions.