ighted to see you. I hope you will
excuse my rising."

He said "Mr. Laflin" with a captivating familiarity of intonation, as
though Mike was something between an old friend and a distinguished
stranger.

"So you are thinking of joining our profession. I hope you liked the
performance. I saw you in front, or at least I thought it was you. And
your friend? I hope he will come and see me some other time. I have been
delighted with his poems."

There is something dazzling and disconcerting to an average layman about
an actor's dressing-room, even though the dressing-room be that of an
intimate friend. He feels like a being on the confines of two worlds and
belonging to neither, awkwardly suspended 'twixt fact and fancy. The
actor for a while has laid aside his part and forgotten his wig and his
make-up. As he talks to you, he is thinking of himself merely as a
private individual; whereas his visitor cannot forget that in appearance
he is a king, or an eighteenth-century dandy, or--though you know him
well enough as a clean-shaven young man of thirty--a bowed and wrinkled
greybeard. The visitor's voice rings thin and hestitating. It cannot
strike the right pitch, and generally he does himself no sort
of justice.

Perhaps, however, it was because Mike had been born for this world in
which now for the first time he found himself, that he suffered from
none of this embarrassment; perhaps, too, it was some half-conscious
instinct of his own gifts that made him quite self-contained in the
presence of acknowledged distinction, so self-contained that you might
have thought he had no reverence. As he had passed across the stage, he
had eyed that mysterious behind-the-scenes rather with the eye of a
future stage-manager, than of a youth all whose dreams converged at this
point, and at this moment.

One touch of the poetry of contrast caught his eye, of which custom
would probably have made him unobservant. In an alcove of the stage, a
"scene-dock," as Mike knew already to call it, a beautiful spirit in
gauze and tights was silently rehearsing to herself a dance which she
had to perform in the next act. Softly and silently she danced,
absorbed in the evolutions of her lithe young body, paying as little
heed to the rough stage-hands who hurried scenery about her on every
side, as those hardened stage-hands paid to her dancing. Henry or Ned
would probably have fallen madly in love with her on the spot. To Mike,
she was but a part