stage; perhaps because the thoroughly tentative nature of everything
they did was so strongly impressed on her.

The piece was rewritten more or less after every performance. They
didn't get the curtain down on the first one until five minutes after
twelve--for even an experienced director like Galbraith can make a
mistake in timing--and the mathematically demonstrated necessity for
cutting, or speeding, a whole hour out of the piece, tamed even the
wild-eyed Mr. Mills. The principals, after having for weeks been
routined in the reading of their lines and the execution of their
business, were given new speeches to say and new things to do at a
moment's notice--literally, sometimes, while the performance was going
on. Ghastly things happened, of course. A tricky similarity of cues
would betray somebody into a speech three scenes ahead; a cut would have
the unforeseen effect of leaving somebody stranded, half-changed, in his
dressing-room when his entrance cue came round; an actor would dry up,
utterly forget his lines in the middle of a scene he could have repeated
in his sleep--and the amazing way in which these disasters were
retrieved, the way these people who hadn't, so far, impressed Rose very
strongly with their collective intelligence, extemporized, righted the
capsizing boat, kept the scene going--somehow--no matter what happened,
gave her a new respect for their claims to a real profession.

This was the great thing they had, she concluded; the quality of coming
up to the scratch, of giving whatever it took out of themselves to meet
the need of the moment. They weren't--her use of this phrase harked back
to the days of the half-back--yellow. If you'd walked through the train
that took them back to Chicago Sunday morning, had seen them, glum,
dispirited, utterly fagged out, unsustained by a single gleam of hope,
you'd have said it was impossible that they should give any sort of
performance that night--let alone a good one. But by eight o'clock that
night, when the overture was called, you wouldn't have known them for
the same people.

There is, to begin with, a certain magic about make-up which lends a
color of plausibility to the paradoxical theory that our emotions spring
from our facial expressions rather than the other way about. Certainly
to an experienced actor, his paint--the mere act of putting it on and
looking at himself in the glass as it is applied--effects for him a
solution of continuity between