wrong. If she was crude it was only a reason the more for talking to
her; he kept saying to her "Ask me--ask me: ask me everything you
can think of."

She asked him, she was perpetually asking him, and at the first
rehearsals, which were without form and void to a degree that made
them strike him much more as the death of an experiment than as the
dawn of a success, they threshed things out immensely in a corner of
the stage, with the effect of his coming to feel that at any rate she
was in earnest. He felt more and more that his heroine was the
keystone of his arch, for which indeed the actress was very ready to
take her. But when he reminded this young lady of the way the whole
thing practically depended on her she was alarmed and even slightly
scandalised: she spoke more than once as if that could scarcely be
the right way to construct a play--make it stand or fall by one poor
nervous girl. She was almost morbidly conscientious, and in theory
he liked her for this, though he lost patience three or four times
with the things she couldn't do and the things she could. At such
times the tears came to her eyes; but they were produced by her own
stupidity, she hastened to assure him, not by the way he spoke, which
was awfully kind under the circumstances. Her sincerity made her
beautiful, and he wished to heaven (and made a point of telling her
so) that she could sprinkle a little of it over Nona. Once, however,
she was so touched and troubled that the sight of it brought the
tears for an instant to his own eyes; and it so happened that,
turning at this moment, he found himself face to face with Mr. Loder.
The manager stared, glanced at the actress, who turned in the other
direction, and then smiling at Wayworth, exclaimed, with the humour
of a man who heard the gallery laugh every night: