To begin with, it was an experience quite unforgettable to the chairman of the Prayer Meeting Committee of the Christian Endeavor Society of the grand old First Church when for the first time he found himself upon the stage of the Burbank at rehearsal time, with twenty-five or thirty real actors and actresses about him. He looked them over curiously, with a puritanic instinct for moral appraisal, as they stood, lounged, sat, gossiped, smoked, laughed or did several of these things at once; yet all keeping a wary eye and ear for the two men who sat at the little table in the center of the bare, empty stage with their heads together over a manuscript.
"Just about like other people," confessed Hampstead to himself, with something of disappointment.
There were some tailor suited women, there were some smartly dressed young men, there were some very nice girls, not more than a whit different in look and manner from the typists in the general office. There were two or three gray-haired men who, so far as appearance and demeanor went, might have served as deacons of the First Church. There were a couple of dignified, matronly-looking elderly ladies with fancy-work or mending in their laps, as they swayed to and fro in the wicker rockers that were a part of the furnishings for Act II of the play then running. These two ladies, so far as John could see, might have been respectively President of the Ladies' Aid and of the Woman's Missionary Society, instead of what they were, "character old women," as he later learned.
Totaling his impressions, Mowrey's Stock Company seemed like a large exclusive family in which he was suffered but not seen. Nobody introduced him to anybody. Mowrey merely threw him a glance, and that was not of recognition but of observation that he was present.
