ith the local management.
But as local managements of provincial theatres shape their existences
so as to avoid responsibilities of any kind save the maintenance of
their bars and the deduction of their percentages from the box-office
receipts, Paul knew that it was ludicrous to expect it to interest
itself in the correspondence of an obscure member of a fourth-rate
company which had once played to tenth-rate business within its
mildewed walls. Being young, he wrote also to the human envelope
containing the essence of stale beer, tobacco and lethargy that was the
stage doorkeeper. But he might just as well have written to the station
master or the municipal gasworks. As a matter of fact Jane and he were
as much lost to one another as if the whole of England had been
primaeval forest.

It was a calamity which he regarded with dismay. He had many friends of
the easy theatrical sort, who knew him as Paul Savelli, a romantically
visaged, bright-natured, charming, intellectual, and execrably bad
young actor. But there was only one Jane who knew him as little Paul
Kegworthy. No woman he had ever met--and in the theatrical world one is
thrown willy-nilly into close contact with the whole gamut of the
sex--gave him just the same close, intimate, comforting companionship.
From Jane he hid nothing. Before all the others he was conscious of
pose. Jane, with her cockney common-sense, her shrewdness, her
outspoken criticism of follies, her unfailing sympathy in essentials,
was welded into the very structure of his being. Only when he had lost
her did he realize this. Amidst all the artificialities and pretences
and pseudo-emotionalities of his young actor's life, she was the one
thing that was real. She alone knew of Bludston, of Barney Bill, of the
model days the memory of which made him shiver. She alone (save Barney
Bill) knew of his high destiny--for Paul, quick to recognize the
cynical scepticism of an indifferent world, had not revealed the Vision
Splendid to any of his associates. To her he could write; to her, when
he was in London, he could talk; to her he could outpour all the jumble
of faith, vanity, romance, egotism and poetry that was his very self,
without thought of miscomprehension. And of late she had mastered the
silly splenetics of childhood. He had an uncomfortable yet comforting
impression that latterly she had developed an odd, calm wisdom, just as
she had developed a calm, generous personality. The last time h