It was startling to be taken into an engineer’s club for the meal. Russell explained, “I was an engineer. It’s not so different from stage directing. You sometimes get very much the same material. I’ve often wanted some dynamite or a pickax at rehearsals. Nice that you floated in just now. I’ve a curiosity about this piece. Does Mr. Walling see money in it? I don’t.” “He thinks it may go,” said Gurdy. “It won’t. It’s sewed up in a crape. If you had a young John Drew and a couple of raving beauties playing it might run six weeks. And Dufford hasn’t any standing among the cerebrals. We might try to brighten the thing with some references to the Nourritures Terrestres or Freud. It’s a moron. Prenatal influence. Mr. Walling tells me we’re to open in Washington, too. My jinx! I went down there to offer up my life for the country and got stuck in the Q.M.C. supervising crates of tomatoes. Did you ever argue with a wholesale grocer about crates? It’s worse than staging a revue.” “That’s a dreadful thing to say!” Russell broke a roll in his pointed fingers and shook his head. “No.... The revue’s a very high form of comedy when it’s handled right. It gets clean away with common sense, for one thing. And it hasn’t a plot. I hate plots unless they’re good plots. That’s why this miserable ‘Todgers’ thing affects me so badly. I hoped Mr. Walling would let me help him with ‘Captain Salvador.’ But it’s his baby.” “Is Rand giving you as much trouble as that every day?” “Trouble? My dear man, you’ve never rehearsed a woman star who had ideas about her art! Rand’s merely rather annoying, not troublesome. He’s got no brains so his idea is to imitate the man who played the part in London. And he’s never learned how to show all his looks, either. But very few Americans know how.” Gurdy liked the director and spent several afternoons at the rehearsals. Cosmo Rand fretted him. The slight man was obdurate. He raced about the stage until Russell checked him. His legs, sheathed always in grey tweed, seemed fluid. The leading woman had an attack of tonsilitis and halted proceedings. It was during this lapse that Gurdy encountered Cosmo Rand in a hotel lounge and nodded. The actor stopped him, deferentially, “I say, I’m afraid poor Russell’s sick to death of me. I’m giving him a bit of trouble.” Gurdy found no answer. The actor fooled with his grey hat, rubbed his vivid nails on a cuff, corrected his moustache and said, “The fact is--I do most sincerely think that Russell’s wrong to drop all the English stage directions. Couldn’t you--suggest that Mr. Walling drop in to watch sometime when Miss Marryatt’s better and we’re rehearsing again?” His soft, round bronze eyes were anxious. He spoke timidly, the rosy fingernails in a row on his lower lip. He was something frail and graceful, a figure from a journal of fashions. Gurdy wondered whether Cora Boyle ever assaulted her poor mate and smiled.