s." And Miss Dietz said: "Oh, Mr. Daly, I am so glad I am prepared;
I should have fallen in my tracks if she had done that to me at night,
without warning."

When I left the stage, one of the ladies swept her dress aside, and said:
"Sit here by me; how tired you must be!" It was the first friendly
advance made to me. Before rehearsal ended I overheard the young man with
the bald head saying: "She has sold us all, and I bet she will completely
change the map of the Fifth Avenue Theatre."

"Oh, no, she won't," answered Lewis, shortly, "she's not that type of
woman!"

"Well, at all events, on the strength of that outburst, I ain't afraid to
bet twenty good dollars that she makes pie out of Ethel's vogue!" Then,
seeing me, he removed his hat hurriedly, offering his shoulder for me to
lean upon as I descended the winding-stairs, and I said to myself:
"Yesterday this would have been a kindly service; to-day--to-day it is
not far from an humiliation."

Hitherto I had known neither clique nor cabal in a theatre; now I found
myself in a network of them. The _favorite_--who, I had supposed, lived
only in the historic novel--I now met in real life, and found her as
charming, as treacherous, and as troublesome in the theatre as she could
ever have been in a royal court. There was no one to explain to me the
nature or progress of the game that was being played when I came upon the
scene; but I soon discovered there were two factions in the theatre, Miss
Agnes Ethel heading one, Miss Fanny Davenport the other. Each had a
following, but Miss Ethel, who had been all-powerful, had overestimated
her strength when she refused, point-blank, to play _Anne Sylvester_,
giving as her reason "the immorality of _Anne_." This from the lady who
had been acting all season in "Fernande" and "Frou-Frou"--as a gambler's
decoy and an adulterous wife abandoning child and home--satisfactorily
proved the utter absence of a sense of humor from her charming make-up.

Mr. Daly, like every other man, could be managed with a little patient
_finesse_, but he would not be bullied in business affairs by any living
creature, as he proved when, rather than change the play to please the
actress he then regarded as his strongest card, he trusted a great part
to the hands of an unknown, untried girl, and gave out to the newspapers
that Miss Ethel had sprained her ankle, and, though in perfect health,
could not walk well enough to act. And, after my momentary outbu