who carries in his pocket a note ending with the words, "before
deciding to put on another play I have been considering." It was
Bleak Street, that night, for young Stewart Canby, and a bleak,
bleak walk he took therein.

Desperate alterations were already scratched into the
manuscript; plans for more and more ran overlapping one another
in his mind, accompanied by phrases--echoes and fragments of
Talbot Potter: "Punch! What this play needs is Punch!" "Big love
scenes!" "Big scene with a man!" "Great sacrifice for a woman!"
"Big-hearted, lovable fellow!" "You dog! So on, so on!" "Zowie!"
He must get all this into the play and yet preserve his "third
act situation," leniently admitted to be "quite a fair" one.
Slacking his gait somewhat, the tormented young man lifted his
hat in order to run his hand viciously through his hair, which
he seemed to blame for everything. Then he muttered, under his
breath, indignantly: "Darn you, let me alone!"

Curious bedevilment! It was not Talbot Potter whom he thus
adjured: it was Wanda Malone. And yet, during the rehearsal, he
had not once thought consciously of the understudy; and he had
come away from the theatre occupied--exclusively, he would have
sworn--with the predicament in which he found himself and his
play. Surely that was enough to fill and overflow any new
playwright's mind, but, about half an hour after he had reached
his room and set to work upon the manuscript of the second act,
he discovered that he had retained, unawares, a singularly clear
impression of Miss Malone.

Then, presently, he realized that distinct pictures of her kept