th her. Unluckily, though, she started off wrong foot
foremost in the very first of their numbers, with a mistake that snarled
up everything and brought down an explosion of wrath from Galbraith.
Even if she'd been trying, he groaned, to make mistakes, he didn't see
how she'd managed that one. But the real nightmare didn't begin till the
first of her scenes with Sylvia, where she had to talk.

She'd said her lines over about a thousand times apiece, and practised
their inflection and phrasing in as many ways as she could think of, but
she had neglected to memorize her cues. Not altogether, of course; she
thought she'd learned them, but they were terribly scanty little cues
anyway, just a single word, usually, and never more than two, and
nothing short of absolutely automatic memorization was any good. So she
sat serene through a five-second stage wait while Quan frantically spun
the pages of his book to find the place--he ought to have been following
of course, but he'd yielded to the temptation of trying to do something
else at the same time and had got lost--and then dry-throated, incapable
of a sound for a couple of seconds more--hours they seemed--after she
had been identified as the culprit who had failed to come in on a cue.

The sight of the author out in the hall invoking his gods to witness
that this girl who had presumed to change his lines, was an idiot
incapable of articulate speech, brought her out of her daze. But even
then she couldn't get anything quite right. There seemed to be no golden
mean between the bellow of a fireman and a tone which Galbraith assured
her wouldn't be audible three rows back. And when they came to one of
the lines she'd been allowed to change, in her panic over the thing, she
mixed the two versions impartially together into a sputter of words that
meant nothing at all, whereupon the author, out at the back of the hall,
laughed maniacally.

She would have gone on stuttering at it until she got it straight, if
Galbraith hadn't put her out of her misery by striding over, snatching
the book from Quan, and reading the line himself. She hadn't anything
more to say in the first act, and she managed to get through the rest of
the song numbers without disaster, if equally without confidence or
dash. She felt as limp as if she had been boiled and put through the
clothes-wringer. And when, as he dismissed the rehearsal Galbraith told
her to wait a minute, she expected nothing less than igno