or now had come
the time when his crowning ambition should be fulfilled, to have the
Imperium unofficially acknowledged as the national theatre, so that
when he retired it should be purchased for the nation and make his
achievement immortal.... Macready, Irving, all of the great line had
perished and were but names, while Henry Butcher would be remembered as
the creator of the theatre, the people's theatre, the nation's
theatre.... Then he remembered a particularly delicious wine he had
drunk in this very room at supper, after rehearsal with the brilliant
woman who had steered him through his early career and had saved him
again and again from disaster--Teresa Chesney. Ah! there was no one
like her now, no one. Actresses were ladies now, they were not of the
theatre.... There was no one now with whom a bottle of old claret had
so divine a flavour.... She would never have let him produce
_Ivanhoe_. She would have read the book for him. She always used to
stand between him and those idiots at the club.

He went to the tantalus on his sideboard and poured himself out a
brandy and soda, and drank to Teresa's memory, and then to the portrait
of his wife, who had been so wonderfully skilful in decorating the
front of the house with Dukes, Duchesses, and celebrities, but it
needed Teresa's power behind the scenes.

It was very distressing that all qualities could not be found in one
woman, and a mocking litany floated through Sir Henry's brain, 'One for
the front of the house, one for the back, one for paragraphs, one for
posters, but a man for business.'

He lay back in his chair and cudgelled his brains for some means of
turning _Ivanhoe_ from a disastrous failure into an apparent success,
but no idea came, and throwing out his long legs and caressing his
round belly he said,--

'If I paint my nose red, and give myself two large eyebrows they'll
laugh, and it might go. I must have a play in which I enter down the
chimney....'

The telephone by his side rang.

'Yes. I'm terribly busy, terribly.... Very well. I'll ring as soon
as I can see him.'

He put down the receiver, flung out his legs once more, and resumed his
thoughts.

'I might pay a visit to America. They keep sending people over here.'
But his memory twinged as he thought of the insulting criticisms he had
encountered on his last visit to Broadway.

'Teresa would tell me what to do. Some one told me Scott was the next
best thing to Shakesp