Before he went to bed that night he posted three words to Mrs.
Alsager--"She's not a bit like it, but I dare say I can make her do."

He was pleased with the way the actress listened, the next day, at
the reading; he was pleased indeed with many things, at the reading,
and most of all with the reading itself. The whole affair loomed
large to him and he magnified it and mapped it out. He enjoyed his
occupation of the big, dim, hollow theatre, full of the echoes of
"effect" and of a queer smell of gas and success--it all seemed such
a passive canvas for his picture. For the first time in his life he
was in command of resources; he was acquainted with the phrase, but
had never thought he should know the feeling. He was surprised at
what Loder appeared ready to do, though he reminded himself that he
must never show it. He foresaw that there would be two distinct
concomitants to the artistic effort of producing a play, one
consisting of a great deal of anguish and the other of a great deal
of amusement. He looked back upon the reading, afterwards, as the
best hour in the business, because it was then that the piece had
most struck him as represented. What came later was the doing of
others; but this, with its imperfections and failures, was all his
own. The drama lived, at any rate, for that hour, with an intensity
that it was promptly to lose in the poverty and patchiness of
rehearsal; he could see its life reflected, in a way that was sweet
to him, in the stillness of the little semi-circle of attentive and
inscrutable, of water-proofed and muddy-booted, actors. Miss Violet
Grey was the auditor he had most to say to, and he tried on the spot,
across the shabby stage, to let her have the soul of her part. Her
attitude was graceful, but though she appeared to listen with all her
faculties her face remained perfectly blank; a fact, however, not
discouraging to Wayworth, who liked her better for not being