ff the one
Italian tag he had picked up from his reading. And filled with one of
the purest joys of the young literary life and therefore untouched by
pessimistic counsel, he left the despairing actor.

The second, a brighter and more successful man, talked with Paul for a
long time about all manner of things. Having no notion of his
antecedents, he assumed him to be a friend of Rowlatt and met him on
terms of social equality. Paul expanded like a flower to the sun. It
was the first time he had spoken with an educated man on common
ground--a man to whom the great imaginative English writers were
familiar friends, who ran from Chaucer to Lamb and from Dryden to
Browning with amazing facility. The strong wine of allusive talk
mounted to Paul's brain. Tingling with excitement, he brought out all
his small artillery of scholarship and acquitted himself so well that
his host sent him off with a cordial letter to a manager of his
acquaintance.

The letter opened the difficult door of the theatre. His absurd beauty
of face and figure, a far greater recommendation in the eyes of the
manager who had begun rehearsals for an elaborate romantic production
than a knowledge of The Faerie Queene, obtained for him an immediate
engagement--to walk on as a gilded youth of Italy in two or three
scenes at a salary of thirty shillings a week. Paul went home and
spread himself like a young peacock before Jane, and said: "I am an
actor."

The girl's eyes glowed. "You are wonderful."

"No, not I," replied Paul modestly. "It is my star."

"Have you got a big part?" asked Jane.

He laughed pityingly, sweeping back his black curls. "No, you silly, I
haven't any lines to speak"--he had at once caught up the phrase--"I
must begin at the beginning. Every actor has to do it."

"You'll get mother and me orders to come and see you, won't you?"

"You shall have a box," declared Paul the magnificent.

Thus began a new phase in the career of Paul Kegworthy. After the first
few days of bewilderment on the bare, bleak stage, where oddments of
dilapidated furniture served to indicate thrones and staircases and
palace doors and mossy banks; where men and women in ordinary costume
behaved towards one another in the most ridiculous way and went through
unintelligible actions with phantom properties; where the actor-manager
would pause in the breath of an impassioned utterance and cry out, "Oh,
my God! stop that hammering!" where nothing looked the le