myself. But just because you wanted things so hard--you were so
perfectly determined that something should happen in a certain way--I
just _had_ to help bring it about, or try to. It would have been
exciting enough just to see that things were wrong and to watch them
coming right. But taking hold one's self and helping a little to make
them come right was--well, as I said, wonderful."

"Well," he said--and now he was brusk again--"I hope Goldsmith and Block
are satisfied. They won't be; of course, unless the thing runs forty
weeks. But that isn't what I want to talk about. I want to talk about
you. I want to know what you're aiming at. I don't mean to-morrow or
next week. You'll stay with this piece, I suppose, as long as the run
lasts. But in the end, what's the idea? Do you want to be an actress?"

He had kept on going after that first question of his, because it was
obvious the girl wasn't ready to answer. She seemed to be struggling to
get the bearings of a perfectly new idea. At length she gave him the
clue.

"It's that forty weeks," she said. "The notion of just going on--not
changing anything or improving anything; doing the same thing over and
over again for forty weeks, or even four, seems perfectly ghastly. And
yet I suppose that's what everybody in the company is hoping for--just
to keep going round and round like a horse at the end of a pole. What
I'd like to do, now that this is finished, is--well, to start another."

His eyes kindled. "That's it," he said. "That's what I've felt about you
all along. I suppose it's the reason I felt you never could be an
actress. You see the thing the way I do--the whole fun of the game is
getting the timing. Once it's got ..." He snapped his fingers; and with
an eager nod she agreed.

He was in focus now, there could he no doubt of that. But it didn't
occur to him that it was the director who was in focus, not the man.
The fact was that in evoking the director she'd banished the man--a
triumph she wasn't to realize the importance of until a good deal later.

"Well, then, look here," he said. "I've an idea that I could use you to
good advantage as a sort of personal assistant. There'll be a good deal
of work just of the sort you did with the sextette, teaching people to
talk and move about like the sort of folk they're supposed to represent.
That's coming in more and more in musical comedies, the use of the
chorus as real people in the story--accounting for their exit