"For God's sake!" said Mr. Bunbury.

"Now what?" inquired the bowler hat, interested, pausing hallway across
the stage.

"Do speak the lines, Teddy," exclaimed Gerald. "Don't skip them in that
sloppy fashion."

"You don't want me to go over the whole thing?" asked the bowler hat,
amazed.

"Yes!"

"Not the whole damn thing?" queried the bowler hat, fighting with
incredulity.

"This is a rehearsal," snapped Mr. Bunbury. "If we are not going to do
it properly, what's the use of doing it at all?"

This seemed to strike the erring Teddy, if not as reasonable, at any
rate as one way of looking at it. He delivered the speech in an injured
tone and shuffled off. The atmosphere of tenseness was unmistakable now.
Sally could feel it. The world of the theatre is simply a large nursery
and its inhabitants children who readily become fretful if anything goes
wrong. The waiting and the uncertainty, the loafing about in strange
hotels in a strange city, the dreary rehearsing of lines which had been
polished to the last syllable more than a week ago--these things had
sapped the nerve of the Primrose Way company and demoralization had set
in. It would require only a trifle to produce an explosion.