it to her.

"Read it again, please," said Miss Cherry.

And then she pointed out to him clearly how it could be improved by
introducing a messenger instead of a telephone call, and cutting the
dialogue just before the climax while they were struggling with the
pistol, and by completely changing the lines and business of Helen
Grimes at the point where her jealousy overcomes her. Hart yielded to
all her strictures without argument. She had at once put her finger on
the sketch's weaker points. That was her woman's intuition that he had
lacked. At the end of their talk Hart was willing to stake the judgment,
experience, and savings of his four years of vaudeville that "Mice Will
Play" would blossom into a perennial flower in the garden of the
circuits. Miss Cherry was slower to decide. After many puckerings of her
smooth young brow and tappings on her small, white teeth with the end of
a lead pencil she gave out her dictum.

"Mr. Hart," said she, "I believe your sketch is going to win out. That
Grimes part fits me like a shrinkable flannel after its first trip to a
handless hand laundry. I can make it stand out like the colonel of the
Forty-fourth Regiment at a Little Mothers' Bazaar. And I've seen you
work. I know what you can do with the other part. But business is
business. How much do you get a week for the stunt you do now?"

"Two hundred," answered Hart.

"I get one hundred for mine," said Cherry. "That's about the natural
discount for a woman. But I live on it and put a few simoleons every
week under the loose brick in the old kitchen hearth. The stage is all