ensible way or other.

So far Cleo had behaved with perfect sang-froid. If at home she had
occasionally allowed her natural excitement to appear, it had been of
a pleasurable kind and fully sympathised with by Morgan. In the mere
commercial transactions that had relation to the enterprise, she had
shown herself as calm and unshakable as a rock, but as soon as the
actual fact of her chosen art began to be concerned, she commenced to
reveal other sides of her nature that disturbed Morgan's blind worship
in no little degree.

The first thing that began to stir his doubts was her method of
engaging the players, for she put on the airs of a grand patron, and
such pleasure did this part of the business give her that she
prolonged it unduly. She made actors and actresses wait upon her time
after time when she had not the slightest intention of engaging them.
She liked to have a crowd waiting in her anteroom at the theatre and
admitted to her august presence one at a time. It behoved her, she
explained to Morgan, to impress people from the beginning, and, though
this was the first time she had had a theatre of her own, she wanted
to appear as if to the manner born. Moreover, when he took the
opportunity, by way of expostulation, to express his sympathy with the
rejected applicants, who had been kept "hanging about" in vain, she
was able to make a show of justification, urging it had been necessary
for her to have the widest latitude of choice.

When the company was complete she laughingly admitted it was none of
the finest, but it would make an excellent foil for herself.

But it was only when the rehearsals began that Morgan discovered Cleo
possessed attributes, frequently associated with genius, it is true,
but by no means certain symptoms of it. Her patience was astonishingly
short and she possessed a temper that was perfectly ungovernable, once
it was roused. He likewise observed that there was a certain
domineering spirit in the whole control of the theatre.

His eyes were first opened to this state of affairs one day when he
had wandered on to the stage and stood surveying the desolate
emptiness of the house, in the vague spaces of which cleaners flitted
about or busied themselves amid the dim tiers of swathed seats.
Orchestra practice was proceeding in the band room, and Morgan stayed
to listen for awhile. A sudden high-pitched brutal comment gave him
the first inkling of the conductor's bullying methods.

The dis