“Yes, giving that to the world! You must leave it with me, I must read it over and over,” Mrs. Alsager pleaded, rising to come nearer and draw the copy, in its cover of greenish-grey paper, which had a generic identity now to him, out of his grasp. “Who in the world will do it?—who in the world can?” she went on, close to him, turning over the leaves. Before he could answer she had stopped at one of the pages; she turned the book round to him, pointing out a speech. “That’s the most beautiful place—those lines are a perfection.” He glanced at the spot she indicated, and she begged him to read them again—he had read them admirably before. He knew them by heart, and, closing the book while she held the other end of it, he murmured them over to her—they had indeed a cadence that pleased him—watching, with a facetious complacency which he hoped was pardonable, the applause in her face. “Ah, who can utter such lines as that?” Mrs. Alsager broke out; “whom can you find to do her?”
“We’ll find people to do them all!”
“But not people who are worthy.”
“They’ll be worthy enough if they’re willing enough. I’ll work with them—I’ll grind it into them.” He spoke as if he had produced twenty plays.
“Oh, it will be interesting!” she echoed.
“But I shall have to find my theatre first. I shall have to get a manager to believe in me.”
“Yes—they’re so stupid!”
“But fancy the patience I shall want, and how I shall have to watch and wait,” said Allan Wayworth. “Do you see me hawking it about London?”
“Indeed I don’t—it would be sickening.”
“It’s what I shall have to do. I shall be old before it’s produced.”