You had to be tough, Joe thought, to take it. That first rehearsal was held in an office building quiet with the Sunday hush. Only one elevator was in service. But the suite of Vic Wylie Productions was articulate with the heart-rending echo of the producer’s suffering and anguish. Beginning at nine o’clock the rehearsal ran, with a few scattered rest periods, until early in the afternoon. Sometimes they spent half an hour on a dozen lines. “No, no,” Wylie moaned. “You’re driving me to murder. I could get away with it, too—nobody’d ever miss you. And if they did discover the bodies I’d get a public vote of thanks. Why do you give me da-da-da-das? I want blood in it. I want it human. I want it to have feeling and life.” Once he took Stella’s part and read a scene. He was a man, and his voice was grotesque in a mother’s rôle, but he managed to throw a ray of illumination on the part. Every line he spoke took on unexpected possibilities. And once he stormed out and slammed the door, and sulked in the outer office for ten minutes. The whole cast was assembled—Stella, Joe, an actor named Bert Farr who played the heavy, and two minor characters. Previously, Joe had read from three scattered scripts; to-day he began to get the _Sue Davis_ story. A widow, after the death of her husband, comes with her son to her sole inheritance, a run-down cottage in a small, hidden, mountain village. But plenty of land goes with the cottage, and the dead husband had a passionate faith in its future. Some day a highway would come over the mountain and run past the door. Some day that land, cleared and level, would be the spot for a profitable gas-station tea-room tourist-cabin business. And so the widow and her son struggle to keep the little that is theirs and dream of the day when that little may be great. But a local skinflint, Israel Tice, played by Bert Farr, also knows the potential value of the property and schemes to secure the ownership. That was as far as Curt Lake, the script-writer, had gone. “What happens later?” Joe asked during one of the rest periods. “Does Sue open a tea-room?” Wylie snarled: “Worry about the script you’re reading.” They stopped for lunch and were working again within an hour. The respite seemed to soothe Wylie into amiability. For fifteen or twenty minutes the rehearsal was unruffled and serene. With Joe reading, the producer all at once became a hair-tearing maniac. “Mo—ther!” His stinging burlesque had just enough of truth to be perfect. “Do we have to have that again? Do you think you’re cast as a babe in arms? Do you want Stella to rock you and lullaby you to sleep? How often do I have to tell you?” A bony forefinger was a spike in Joe’s face. “Give me the ‘Mother’ I want.” Joe gave it. At half-past ten they stopped. Circles had formed under Stella’s eyes. Joe’s head was light. “And I have to go through this for thirteen weeks,” Wylie moaned. “I’m buying coffee and sandwiches. Who’s coming?”