He consulted the advice note of these extraordinary goods. “That’s right,” he admitted. “Arden! Whom did you see as Rosalind?”
Mary Ellen blushed: he seemed to her to read her secrets. “And me a man that respects Shakespeare,” he said. “There’s one line of the Banished Duke you may remember. ‘Sweet are the uses of adversity.’ If you don’t remember the line, you’re going to, Miss Mary Arden. You chose the name. I don’t know that I don’t choose to make you worthy of it.”
“Oh, will you?” she cried.
“You’ve got no sense of humor,” he said. “Come on the stage and we’ll see what you have got. It’ll be like going water-finding in the Sahara. Can you read music?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Then be looking at those songs. There’s a piano in the orchestra. I’m going down to it.”
She was staring in amazement at the sheeted auditorium into which the unexpected rake of the stage seemed threatening to precipitate her. Vague masses hung over her head in the half-light seeming about to fall and crush her in the grisly loneliness to which she was abandoned as Mr. Darley went round to the orchestra. The diminished echoes of his footfalls were a wan assurance that this place, shunned by daylight as if it were a tomb, had contacts with humanity. But he had said it was the stage and however disconcerting she might find its obscure menace, the stage was where she wished to be and she was not to be put down either by it or by a little man who was rude about her best clothes, while he had not shaved that morning and his knickerbockers showed a rent verging on the scandalous. She had to sing to him and she expelled her terrors of her strange, her so alarmingly dreary surroundings, and strained her eyes to read the music he had put into her hands.
He seemed to bob up below her like a jack-in-the-box, and struck some chords on the piano. “Have you got that one?” he asked.
“Yes.” she said, fighting her impulse to scream at the phenomenon of his sudden reappearance.
“Then let her go.”