she keeps cutting my speeches. By the end of the week, I won't have any part left at all."
Parks indulged a self-satisfied chuckle at the keenness of his own discernment.
"Don't you see," he explained, "she's cutting the stuff you do badly. She took away from you a situation in which you were awkward and unreal. She changed that scene around and left you with a climax in which you are positively graceful as well as forceful. You'll get a big hand in it. She studies you. I've watched her."
"Old man," blurted Hampstead, with sudden fervor, "it would make me the happiest man in the world if I thought that you were right. But you are wrong, and her badgering has begun to get on my nerves. Say!" and he interrupted himself to ask a question not yet answered to his satisfaction. "Why is she here?—with the People's, I mean?"
"You've heard the stories," answered Parks, with a shrug. "However, I doubt if it's any mere whim. She appears to me to have a cool, good reason for anything she does."
Parks turns off at Ninth Street, and John moved on down Market. "A cold good reason for what she does," he murmured. "What's the answer, I wonder, to what she does to me?"
As the days went on, John's wonder grew.
Now it is according to the method of dramatists that when a husband is to be abandoned by his wife in the second act there shall be certain tender passages between the two in the first act, and this ancient drama was no exception. There were contacts, handclasps, embraces, kisses. Through all of these at rehearsal time the two went mechanically. Miss Dounay apparently treated Hampstead with mere indifference, but actually she found a thousand little ways to show utter repugnance. After
