earsing when nobody knows if we'll ever open. They
were all keyed up a week ago, and they've been sagging ever since. It
will ruin the play, of course. My first chance! Just chucked away."

Sally was listening with a growing feeling of desolation. She tried to
be fair, to remember that he had had a terrible disappointment and was
under a great strain. And yet... it was unfortunate that self-pity was a
thing she particularly disliked in a man. Her vanity, too, was hurt. It
was obvious that her arrival, so far from acting as a magic restorative,
had effected nothing. She could not help remembering, though it made
her feel disloyal, what Mr. Faucitt had said about Gerald. She had never
noticed before that he was remarkably self-centred, but he was thrusting
the fact upon her attention now.

"That Hobson woman is beginning to make trouble," went on Gerald,
prodding in a despairing sort of way at scrambled eggs. "She ought never
to have had the part, never. She can't handle it. Elsa Doland could play
it a thousand times better. I wrote Elsa in a few lines the other day,
and the Hobson woman went right up in the air. You don't know what a
star is till you've seen one of these promoted clothes-props from the
Follies trying to be one. It took me an hour to talk her round and keep
her from throwing up her part."

"Why not let her throw up her part?"

"For heaven's sake talk sense," said Gerald querulously. "Do you suppose
that man Cracknell would keep the play on if she wasn't in it? He would
close the show in a second, and where would I be then? You don't seem
to realize that this is a big chance for me. I'd look a fool throwing it
away."

"I see," said Sally, shortly. She had never felt so wretched in her
life. Foreign travel, she decided, was a mistake. It might be pleasant
and broadening to the mind, but it seemed to put you so out of touch
with people when you got back. She analysed her sensations, and arrived
at the conclusion that what she was resenting was the fact that Gerald
was trying to get the advantages of two attitudes simultaneously. A man
in trouble may either be the captain of his soul and superior to pity,
or he may be a broken thing for a woman to pet and comfort. Gerald,
it seemed to her, was advertising himself as an object for her
commiseration, and at the same time raising a barrier against it. He
appeared to demand her sympathy while holding himself aloof from it. She
had the uncomfortable sensation