Dick could advance no reason, and once begun, the studies proceeded gaily. Apparently deeply interested, Dick lay back in the armchair smoking perpetual cigarettes. Montgomery hammered with nervous vigour at the piano, and Kate stood by his side, her soul burning in the ardours of her task. She would have preferred the part of Germaine; it would have better suited her gentle mind than the frisky Serpolette; but it seemed vain to hope for illness or any accident that would prevent Beaumont from playing. True, Leslie was often imprudent, and praying for a bronchial visitation they watched at night to see how she was wrapped up.
As soon as Kate knew the music, a rehearsal was called for her to go through the business, and it was then that the long-smouldering indignation broke out against her. In the first place the girl who till now had been entrusted with the understudy, and had likewise lived in the hopes of coughs and colds, burst into floods of passionate tears and storms of violent words. She attacked Kate vigorously, and the scene was doubly unpleasant, as it took place in the presence of everybody. Bitter references were made to dying and deserted husbands, and all the acridness of the chorus-girl was squeezed into allusions anent the Divorce Court. This was as disagreeable for Dick as for Kate. The rehearsal had to be dismissed, and the lady in question was sent back to London. Sympathy at first ran very strongly on the side of the weak, and the ladies of the theatre were united in their efforts to make it as disagreeable as possible for Kate. But she bore up courageously, and after a time her continual refusal to rehearse the part again won a reaction in her favour; and when Miss Leslie's cold began to grow worse, and it became clear that someone must understudy Serpolette, the part fell without opposition to her share.
And now every minute of the day was given to learning or thinking out in her inner consciousness some portion of her part. In the middle of her breakfast she would hurriedly lay down her cup with a clink in the saucer and say, 'Look here, Dick; tell me how I'm to do that run in—my first entrance, you know.'
'What are your words, dear?'
'"Who speaks ill of Serpolette?"'
The breakfast-table would then be pushed out of the way and the entrance rehearsed. Dick seemed never to weary, and the run was practised over and over again. Coming home from the theatre at night, it was always a question of this effect and that effect; of whether Leslie might not have scored a point if she had accentuated the lifting of her skirt in the famous song.
That was, as Dick declared, the 'number of grip'; and often, at two o'clock in the morning, just as she was getting into bed, Kate, in her chemise, would begin to sing:
'"Look at me here! look at me there!
Criticize me everywhere!
From head to feet I am most sweet,
And most perfect and complete."'
There was a scene in the first act in which Serpolette had to run screaming with laughter away from her cross old uncle, Gaspard, and dodge him, hiding behind the Baillie, and to do this effectively required a certain chic, a gaiety, which Kate did not seem able to summon up; and this was the weak place in her rendering of the part. 'You're all right for a minute, and then you sober down into a Germaine,' Dick would say, at the end of a long and critical conversation. The business she learned to 'parrot.' Dick taught her the gestures and the intonations of voice to be used, and when she had mastered these Dick said he would back her to go through the part quite as well as Leslie.
Leslie! The word was now constantly in their minds. Would her cold get worse or better? was the question discussed most frequently between Dick, Kate, and Montgomery. Sometimes it was better, sometimes worse; but at the moment of their greatest despondency the welcome news came that she had slipped downstairs and sprained her foot badly.