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?"
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 the first shock, John's combative instinct and his pride led him to face this situation, so difficult for a gentleman, unflinchingly. Taking her hands, pressing her to him, patting her cheek, playing with the wisps of hair upon her temple, he conscientiously rehearsed the part of the affectionate, doting husband. His very sincerity, it would seem, must have been a rebuke to the woman. She must have seen that his heart was stirred by an unexplained feeling toward her, and might have observed in his determined bearing under the galling fire of her man-baiting something noble.
Here, if she could only perceive it, was a man who had turned his back on at least one of the kingdoms of this world to become an actor; a man who would endure anything, suffer anything to add to his knowledge and skill in that difficult and all demanding art; which, indeed, was why he laid himself open to her polished ridicule by over-playing every scene, overemphasizing every word, over-expressing every gesture and emotion.