It was well along in the autumn when Will signed and immediately began rehearsals. The star was a petulant little lady who, by grace of her marriage with a manager, had been hoisted to her present position, a position to which she was not equal either by training, personality or talent. For several seasons the husband-manager had invested--and lost--large sums of money in the attempt to build up a following for his wife. The present venture was a kind of last straw. That there was more or less "feeling" between the couple was evinced by their frequent _passages d'armes_ of a personal nature, at rehearsals. Accustomed as he was to the thoroughness of the stage-management under which he had worked during the past two seasons, Will found the hit and miss methods of his new affiliation disconcerting and irritating. In addition to this, the husband-manager-director had a picturesque if not a literate command of the language. He was in the habit of standing in the centre aisle or at the back of the theatre and shouting his directions to the members on the stage. When, as sometimes happened, a member resented the manager's method of criticism in no uncertain terms, that personage would back down and with tearful, if blasphemous, appeal explain himself. On opening nights, in response to the persistent calls from the claque, the manager reluctantly (!) appeared before the curtain to bow his acknowledgment--in shirt sleeves--his air of exhaustion contrasting sharply with his jaws which worked a piece of chewing-gum like a ticket-chopper in rush hours. It would seem that the vanity of actors is not an exclusive attribute. The metropolitan reception of the play and star was not one of unmitigated joy. The husband-manager, not liking the opinions of the press, talked back both in print and from the stage. Two ghastly weeks in New York, playing to a papered house or empty seats, and the company took to the coal regions. Another fortnight was spent sparring for open time, reluctantly doled out to the weak, and the company gave up the ghost. Obviously Will had entered upon a cycle of bad luck. I took upon myself to look for an engagement. Not only on account of the material consideration, but because the emptiness and loneliness of my life had become no longer endurable. Self-imposed tasks palled. My mind refused to concentrate upon the line of study I had outlined. "And thus the native hue of resolution is sickled o'er with the pale cast of thought." The career I once planned for myself had been consigned to the dump heap of lost illusions. I could not touch the clay which once had thrilled me with ambition.