g new.'

'This fellow Mann.'

'But! He's mad. If he walked into the Club half the men would walk
out of it.'

'He has made himself felt.'

'Yes. But in the wrong way.'

'The wrong way is often the right way in the end.'

'You can't have him in the theatre, Chief, after the way he has talked
about us, as though none of us knew our business.'

'He might say so if he saw our balance-sheet,' said Sir Henry, who
loved nothing so much as teasing his loyal subordinates. 'We've
nothing but this melodrama of Halford Bunn's in which I should have to
play the Pope.'

'Well, you were a great success as a Cardinal, Chief.'

'Hm! Hm! Yes.' Sir Henry began to live again through the success of
_The Cardinal's Niece_, but also he remembered the horrible time he had
had at rehearsals with Mr Halford Bunn who would get so drunk with his
own words that any acting which distracted attention from them drove
him almost into hysterics.

Sir Henry laughed.

'Bunn or Mann.... Said Mr Mann to Mr Bunn, "I hope you've got a record
run." Said Mr Bunn to Mr Mann, "You, sir, are but an also ran."'

'Ha! ha! ha!' laughed the manager.

'He! he! he!' laughed Sir Henry, and they parted without having solved
their problem, though the impishness in Sir Henry made him long to
infuriate both Bunn and Mann by a merger of his contracts with the two
of them.... Oh! dear. Oh, dear, authors had always been trial enough,
but if artists were going to begin to thrust their inflated egoism into
the machinery of the theatre then the life of its manager would become
unbearable.... Sir Henry liked to drift and to make sudden and
surprising decisions.

In this case the decision was made for him--by Clara. It had become
one of his chief pleasures to give her lunch in the Aquarium, as she
called it, and to laugh with her over her vivid and comic impressions
of London, and insensibly he had fallen in love with her, not as was
his habit theatrically and superficially, but with an old man's passion
for youth. It hurt him, plagued him, tortured him, because she never
gave him an opening for flirtation, but kept his wits at full stretch
and made him feel thirty again: and as he felt thirty he wanted to be
thirty.... She never discussed her private affairs with him, but he
knew that she lived alone. She baffled him, bewildered him, until he
was often hard put to it not to burst into tears. So quick she was and
she understood so well, had so kee