w in a long unsteady breath and pressed her cooling hands down
upon her face.

What a thing his love would be, when it should come, free of its tasks
and obligations; no longer in the treadmill making her world go round,
but given its wings again!

CHAPTER VIII

SUCCESS--AND A RECOGNITION

There is a kaleidoscopic character about the events of the ten days or
so preceding the opening performance of most musical comedies which
would make a sober chronicle of them seem fantastically incredible; and
this law of Nature made no exception in the case of _The Girl
Up-stairs_. There were rehearsals which ran so smoothly and swiftly that
they'd have done for performances; there were others so abominably bad
that the bare idea of presenting the mess resulting from six weeks'
toil, before people who had paid money to see it, was a nightmare.

As the nervous pressure mounted, people took to exploding all over the
place in the most grotesquely inconceivable ways and from totally
unpredictable causes. Freddy France, who played the comic detective
(like most comedians he had no sense of humor whatever and treated his
"art" with a sort of sacrificial solemnity), developed delusions of
persecution, proclaimed himself the victim of a conspiracy to which the
owners, the author, Galbraith and most of the principals were parties,
and finally, when the director cut out a little scene that he had two
feeble jokes in, reached up unexpectedly and hit McGill on the nose,
flung his part on the stage, stamped on it and left the theater. Quan
read his lines in a painstaking manner for two days and then, after a
three-hour session in the Sherman House bar, Freddy was induced to come
back.

Stewart Lester, one day, at the end of a long patient effort of
Galbraith's to improve his acting (he acted like a tenor; one needn't
say more than that), licked his thin red lips, and in a feline fury,
announced his indifference as to whether the management accepted his
resignation or that of Miss Devereux. As long as she insisted on
treating her vis-a-vis like a chorus-man, she'd perhaps be happier if a
chorus-man were given the part; and he would he only too happy, in case
the management agreed with her, to make the substitution possible.
Whereupon Miss Devereux remarked that even having been a failure in
grand opera didn't necessarily assure a man success in musical comedy,
and that possibly a chorus-man would be an improvement. Galbraith had a