h a native
sharpness and a touching young candour; the expansion of the commercial
spirit when it relaxes and generalises, is conscious of safety with
another member of the guild.

Peter at any rate couldn't help protesting against the lame old
war-horse it was proposed to bring into action, who had been ridden to
death and had saved a thousand desperate fields; and he exclaimed on
the strange passion of the good British public for sitting again and
again through expected situations, watching for speeches they had heard
and surprises that struck the hour. Dashwood defended the taste of
London, praised it as loyal, constant, faithful; to which his
interlocutor retorted with some vivacity that it was faithful to sad
trash. He justified this sally by declaring the play in rehearsal sad
trash, clumsy mediocrity with all its convenience gone, and that the
fault was the want of life in the critical sense of the public, which
was ignobly docile, opening its mouth for its dose like the pupils of
Dotheboys Hall; not insisting on something different, on a fresh brew
altogether. Dashwood asked him if he then wished their friend to go on
playing for ever a part she had repeated more than eighty nights on end:
he thought the modern "run" was just what he had heard him denounce in
Paris as the disease the theatre was dying of. This imputation Peter
quite denied, wanting to know if she couldn't change to something less
stale than the greatest staleness of all. Dashwood opined that Miss
Rooth must have a strong part and that there happened to be one for her
in the before-mentioned venerable novelty. She had to take what she
could get--she wasn't a person to cry for the moon. This was a
stop-gap--she would try other things later; she would have to look round
her; you couldn't have a new piece, one that would do, left at your door
every day with the milk. On one point Sherringham's mind might be at
rest: Miss Rooth was a woman who would do every blessed thing there was
to do. Give her time and she would walk straight through the repertory.
She was a woman who would do this--she was a woman who would do that:
her spokesman employed this phrase so often that Peter, nervous, got up
and threw an unsmoked cigarette away. Of course she was a woman; there
was no need of his saying it a hundred times.

As for the repertory, the young man went on, the most beautiful girl in
the world could give but what she had. He explained, after their visitor