at do you think?" demanded Miss Adair.

"I wish I could have had the making of it over, and for myself instead
of Hawtry. That's no play as it stands, but there is a dandy one to be
worked up from it that you--you--that would be like you," was the reply
that Miss Lindsey gave as she looked out into distance, with glowing
eyes.

"Do you think that--that horrid play will be a success?" asked Miss
Adair, with her voice sparkling.

"I do," answered Miss Lindsey. "And it is curious that with all its
changes it is still--still yours. There is a lot more of your stuff left
than you realize, and the turns that--that Mr. Vandeford's playwright
has given it are very clever. Lots of times he's just paraphrased your
lines into Hawtryites. It will be interesting to see how much of you is
left when we all come out of the wash for the first night."

"I wish I were dead and buried!" she was surprised to hear Miss Adair
confess, and there then ensued a downpour, which the hardier Western
girl weathered for very love of the young Southern tempest in her arms.

"I suppose I ought to go home, out of the way, but I'm going to stay
and--and learn--and write another one all by myself," she finally
sobbed, with returning courage, thus comforting herself with the resolve
which every playwright who ever built a play has used to keep from going
entirely mad during the rehearsals of his first play.

"Just try to live until the New York opening, and then see how you feel.
That is the way actors do to keep going during the awful grilling of the
rehearsals and the road try-out," advised Miss Lindsey, with great
soothing.

"I will," promised Miss Adair, and turned her face on her pillow, to
sleep, while Miss Lindsey took herself and her jar of cold-cream into
her own cell.

"I wish I had a chance at that play! What'll she do when she sees Hawtry
and Height really in action in some of those scenes?" she murmured into
her own pillow.

The next morning Miss Adair rose, donned a most lovely home-spun linen
gown, which was of an old ivory hue and which had been spun upon the
looms of her great-great-great grandmother by that lady's slaves,
crowned this toilet with the floppy hat covered with crushed roses she
and Miss Lindsey and Mr. Farraday had purchased, and reported herself
about an hour late at the rehearsals of "The Purple Slipper," whose
authorship she had repudiated. She seated herself in the dusk of the
left stage-box and bared her brea