't profess to understand
it, but having been assured by the designer that it was art nouveau,
which also he didn't understand, he was wholly satisfied.

Not so the stage director, whose language in describing the effect it
had upon him would have done credit to a gunman under the influence of
cheap brandy and fright. The rehearsal, which had commenced at eight
o'clock, had been hung up for a time considerable enough to allow him
to give vent to his sentiments. The pause enabled Mosely, squatting
frog-wise in the middle of the orchestra stalls, to surround himself
with several women whose gigantic proportions were horribly exposed to
the eye. The rumble of his voice and the high squeals of their laughter
clashed with the sounds of the vitriolic argument on the stage, and the
noises of a bored band, in which an oboe was giving a remarkable
imitation of a gobbling turkey cock, and a cornet of a man blowing his
nose. The leader of the band was pacing up and down the musicians'
room, saying to himself: "Zis is ze last timer. Zis is ze last timer,"
well knowing that it wasn't. The poor devil had a wife and children to
feed.

Bevies of weary and spirit-broken chorus girls in costume were
sprawling on the chairs in the lower boxes, some sleeping, some too
tired to sleep, and some eating ravenously from paper bags. Chorus men
and costumers, wig makers and lyric writers, authors and friends of the
company, sat about singly and in pairs in the orchestra seats. They
were mostly bored so far beyond mere impatience by all this
super-inefficiency and chaos as to have arrived at a state of
intellectual coma. The various men out of whose brains had originally
come the book and lyrics no longer hated each other and themselves;
they lusted for the blood of the stage director or saw gorgeous mental
pictures of a little fat oozy corpse surrounded by the gleeful faces of
the army of people who had been impotent to protest against the lash of
his whip, the impertinence of his tongue or the gross dishonesty of his
methods.

One other man in addition to the raucous, self-advertising stage
director, Jackrack, commonly called "Jack-in-office," showed distinct
signs of life--a short, overdressed, perky person with piano fingers
and baldish head much too big for his body, who flitted about among the
chorus girls, followed by a pale, drab woman with pins, and touched
their dresses and sniggered and made remarks with a certain touch of
literary e