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Inasmuch as you can tell nothing whatever about an actor by looking at him, and still less by listening to his first reading of lines, and inasmuch as these two are the only ways of choosing an actor, it is probable that nobody has ever yet been chosen for any role in any play.

Bethel and all the Olde Roanoke pilgrims had resented the fact that so few managers would ever give an unknown the chance to read, to be heard and seen. 'It's their duty to give every kid that much chance, anyway,' they had raged. Now she wondered if it wasn't less cruel to refuse even to see a job hunter than to let him go on reading, out of courtesy, when you were certain from the first sentence that he would not do.

She found the whole business of listening to the reading horrible. Two of the young men were too soft--they made Mercutio into a teashop proprietress; the third, though he looked like a young white-browed angel, was too tough. He made Mercutio into a battling longshoreman.

But to all three of them the three judges listened with glazed politeness. They were arbiters of life and wages and glory--and Bethel didn't like that at all. She suffered with the defendants, and wanted to help them, and didn't know how.

Through the ordeal by fire, the telephone kept ringing, relentlessly, contemptuously, and Bethel, cursing the name of Alexander Graham Bell, took over the answering . . . Could Mr. Deacon see a fourteen-year-old prodigy who would make the greatest Juliet in history? Would Mr. Deacon be interested in buying, for two hundred dollars, a playbill of Salvini in Macbeth from a dear old lady with a mortgage? Would Mr. Deacon see--right away, this minute--a dear old friend of Mr. Deacon's, who hadn't ever exactly met him, but who had been at Grampion for two weeks, three years ago, and who was now generously waiting down in the lobby?

In all her life Bethel had never learned so much about practical perjury.

The young men finished reading. To each of them, in turn, Andy said with wretched politeness, 'We'll let you know in just a few days. Will you please leave your name and telephone number with my secretary, Miss Merriday, here?'

And with equally phony hopefulness and gratitude each of the three young men bowed out--condemned again to a death of dreary waiting.

Satori had gone. Andy seemed not to remember anything about the promised dinner, and Beth could have used a good dinner just then. She had not had one for ten days.

Andy and she were going over and over the satin outrageousness of Mrs. Boyle and the huge demerits and few virtues of the three candidates, when Zed Wintergeist exploded into the room, without ringing, except as he was in himself a clamorously ringing bell.

But he was low to-night. Bethel had remembered him as a combination of Jed Harris, Orson Welles, Richard Whorf, Jack London, Tarzan, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, but to-night he was just a strong young man, broad-shouldered but not very tall, in need of a comb, sulky and rather pale; a plebeian who was inconceivable as Mercutio, the cavalier.

'Hello, Andy,' he croaked. He stared at Bethel, scratched his chin, then snapped his fingers at her, infuriatingly, and shouted, 'Wait---wait, I tell you! Don't prompt me!'

Indignantly, 'I don't intend to.'

'Hush! Oh, I've got it, Grampion. The nosy character in Stage Door. Beth Merriday! Greetings, pet . . . What can I do for you, Andy?'

'I'm organizing a Romeo and Juliet company--'

'Why not Uncle Tomeo's Cabin?'

'I wouldn't mind . . . We're going on the road for I don't know how long, and then come into New York if we're any good. I think you might possibly do Mercutio, if you're interested.'

'I'm not. Romeo and Juliet was a good play once--hell-raising youth, cockeyed, funny, romantic, swell. Now it belongs with these knitting shops you see in old fishing shacks all along the New England coast. It's pure and noble and phony.'

'But we're going to do it in modern dress--first time Romeo's ever been done that way, far as we can find out. That ought to be experimental enough for even you, Zed.'

'Look here. I don't think a play's necessarily good because it's experimental. Maybe I did once--two years ago--two thousand years ago. Not now. Any provincial Little Theatre that's run as an adjunct to the golf club, and that plays Liliom in front of a muslin cyc, does more experimentation in six months than the whole Abbey Theatre in six years. Still . . . It could be interesting. Who's directing?'

'Satori.'

'Mm. He knows his business. He's even heard of Lope de Vega and of jackknife stages. Of course he's completely cynical and dishonest.'

Bethel was foaming with indignation. This creature Zed, who had crawled out of the woodpile, to pick and chatter at the Sun God's proffered gift!

Andy was gentle as he hinted, 'There may be a lot to what you say, Zed. What are you doing?'

'Starving.'

'No plans?'

'Same answer: starving! I was out on the road for two whole weeks with that awful flop, The Soul Clinic. We didn't even bring it into town. But I did well financially. Two hundred and fifty a week! Two-fifty for two weeks makes five hundred bucks, and five hundred bucks divided by fifty gives me ten dollars a week for the whole year round, and you can live on that--in fact you can live on even less than that, in jail, I suppose--'

'Zed!'

'Huh?'

'You know you're coming with us! Make Mercutio contemporary. He's a good deal like you, anyway--crazy, poetic and bad-tempered.'

'Well--'

'You know you're going to do it, Zed, if you can get enough salary out of me, so why waste time in all this unpaid performing? Mercutio in uniform--no illusions about immortality--sore because he's going to die. Heh?'

'Well,' said Zed.

Andy took him into the entryway to whisper about salary--that was artistico-commercial etiquette, not to talk openly about money--and Zed returned to shake Bethel's hand and shout, 'Good! Let's go! Streamlined Shakespeare with gyroscopic control! See you on the stage, pet.'

Bethel painfully did not tell him that she wasn't of the company at all.

She was cross with Andy, though she felt petty in view of the fact that she had seen him patting two or three banknotes into Zed's gritty hand.

It was ten by the rock-crystal electric clock on the balcony railing. Andy, spreadeagled on a couch beside the fireplace, wailed, 'I'm completely exhausted', and in a completely unexhausted voice started what promised to be an hour's commentary:

'I'm glad we've got Zed. If Adrian will just beat him to death at the first rehearsal--'

He was interrupted by a very small voice.

'Please?'

'What is it, darling?'

'Dinner?'

'What?'

'Please? Dinner?'

'My Lord, what a sarcophagus I am, what a zany, what a gaby, what a doodle, what a dizzard, what a hoddy-doddy, what a tom-noddy, what a dunderpate, what a jobber-nowl, what a gowk! I didn't have lunch till four. I forgot people do get hungry. My poor drowned kitten! You shall have champagne and caviare and the sound of flutes.'

She did, too--the flutes provided by the electric phonograph. He even cut off the telephone and, though once every quarter-hour a page would knock with a sheaf of telephone memoranda, they dined in almost matrimonial peace and drowsiness.

With a script of Romeo and Juliet by his plate, Andy droned about cuts for their acting version. He seemed to take her as his equal--his sister, his old trouping companion--she who was wondering if by direct interposition of Heaven she might get a chance to broadcast two lines four weeks from now as an Apache squaw in the 'St. Clair of San Antone' radio serial.