“But I shall have to find my theatre first. I shall have to get a manager to believe in me.” “Yes—they’re so stupid!” “But fancy the patience I shall want, and how I shall have to watch and wait,” said Allan Wayworth. “Do you see me hawking it about London?” “Indeed I don’t—it would be sickening.” “It’s what I shall have to do. I shall be old before it’s produced.” “I shall be old very soon if it isn’t!” Mrs. Alsager cried. “I know one or two of them,” she mused. “Do you mean you would speak to them?” “The thing is to get them to read it. I could do that.” “That’s the utmost I ask. But it’s even for that I shall have to wait.” She looked at him with kind sisterly eyes. “You sha’n’t wait.” “Ah, you dear lady!” Wayworth murmured. “That is _you_ may, but _I_ won’t! Will you leave me your copy?” she went on, turning the pages again. “Certainly; I have another.” Standing near him she read to herself a passage here and there; then, in her sweet voice, she read some of them out. “Oh, if _you_ were only an actress!” the young man exclaimed. “That’s the last thing I am. There’s no comedy in _me_!” She had never appeared to Wayworth so much his good genius. “Is there any tragedy?” he asked, with the levity of complete confidence. She turned away from him, at this, with a strange and charming laugh and a “Perhaps that will be for you to determine!” But before he could disclaim such a responsibility she had faced him again and was talking about Nona Vincent as if she had been the most interesting of their friends and her situation at that moment an irresistible appeal to their sympathy. Nona Vincent was the heroine of the play, and Mrs. Alsager had taken a tremendous fancy to her. “I can’t _tell_ you how I like that woman!” she exclaimed in a pensive rapture of credulity which could only be balm to the artistic spirit. “I’m awfully glad she lives a bit. What I feel about her is that she’s a good deal like _you_,” Wayworth observed. Mrs. Alsager stared an instant and turned faintly red. This was evidently a view that failed to strike her; she didn’t, however, treat it as a joke. “I’m not impressed with the resemblance. I don’t see myself doing what she does.” “It isn’t so much what she _does_,” the young man argued, drawing out his moustache. “But what she does is the whole point. She simply tells her love—I should never do that.” “If you repudiate such a proceeding with such energy, why do you like her for it?” “It isn’t what I like her for.” “What else, then? That’s intensely characteristic.” Mrs. Alsager reflected, looking down at the fire; she had the air of having half-a-dozen reasons to choose from. But the one she produced was unexpectedly simple; it might even have been prompted by despair at not finding others. “I like her because _you_ made her!” she exclaimed with a laugh, moving again away from her companion.