“Anything to bring him to reason! He is over-rehearsing! Every line, every sentence, every gesture, he makes the subject of the most exhaustive deliberation. He will have nothing spontaneous; it is positively stifling. A few more days of it and my reason will go! He is a great actor, but he does not seem to understand that to reduce everything to mathematical proportions is to court failure.”
“I will go and see him,” Matravers said. “You wish for no more rehearsals, then?”
“I do not want to see his face again before the night of the performance,” she declared vehemently. “I am perfect in my part. I have thought about it—dreamed about it. I have lived more as ‘Bathilde’ than as myself for the last three weeks. Perhaps,” she continued more slowly, “you will not be satisfied. I scarcely dare to hope that you will be. Yet I have reached my limitations. The more I am made to rehearse now, the less natural I shall become.”
“I will speak to Fergusson,” Matravers promised. “I will go and see him to-night. But so far as you are concerned, I have no fear; you will be the ‘Bathilde’ of my heart and my brain. You cannot fail!”
She rose to her feet. “It is,” she said, “The desire of my life to make your ‘Bathilde’ a creature of flesh and blood. If I fail, I will never act again.”
“If you fail,” he said, “the fault will be in my conception, not in your execution. But indeed we will not consider anything so improbable. Let us put the play behind us for a time and talk of something else! You must be weary of it.”
She shook her head. “Not that! never that! Just now it is my life, only it is the details which weary me, the eternal harping upon the mechanical side of it. Will you read to me for a little? and I will make you some coffee. You are not in a hurry, are you?”
“I have come,” he said, “to stay with you until you send me away! I will read to you with pleasure. What will you have?”
She handed him a little volume of poems; he glanced at the title and made a faint grimace. They were his own.