Mrs. Perkins.  I’m getting it all right, I think.  I’ve been rehearsing all day.

Perkins.  You bet your life on that, Henry Cobb, real Earl of Puddingford.  If you aren’t restored to your estates and title this night, it won’t be for any lack of suffering on my part.  Give me your biking cap, unless you want to use it in the play.  I’ll hang it up. [Exit.

Yardsley.  Thanks. (Looks about the room.) Everything here seems to be right.

Perkins returns.

Mrs. Perkins (rehearsing).  And henceforth, my lord, let us understand one another.

Perkins.  Certainly, my dear.  I’ll go and have myself translated.  Would you prefer me in French, German, or English?

Yardsley.  I hope it goes all right to-night.  But, I must say, I don’t like the prospect.  This beastly behavior of Henderson’s has knocked me out.

Perkins.  What’s the matter with Henderson?

Mrs. Perkins.  He hasn’t withdrawn, has he?

Yardsley.  That’s just what he has done.  He sent me word this morning.

Mrs. Perkins.  But what excuse does he offer?  At the last moment, too!

Yardsley.  None at all—­absolutely.  There was some airy persiflage in his note about having to go to Boston at six o’clock.  Grandmother’s sick or something.  He writes so badly I couldn’t make out whether she was rich or sick.  I fancy it’s a little of both.  Possibly if she wasn’t rich he wouldn’t care so much when she fell ill.  That’s the trouble with these New-Englanders, anyhow—­they’ve always got grandmothers to fall down at crucial moments.  Next time I go into this sort of thing it’ll be with a crowd without known ancestors.

Perkins.  ’Tisn’t Chet’s fault, though.  You don’t suspect him of having poisoned his grandmother just to get out of playing, do you?

Mrs. Perkins.  Oh, Thaddeus, do be serious!

Perkins.  I was never more so, my dear.  Poisoning one’s grandmother is no light crime.

Yardsley.  Well, I’ve a notion that the whole thing is faked up.  Henderson has an idea that he’s a little tin Booth, and just because I called him down the other night at our first rehearsal he’s mad.  That’s the milk in the cocoanut, I think.  He’s one of those fellows you can’t tell anything to, and when I kicked because he wore a white tie with a dinner coat, he got mad and said he was going to dress the part his own way or not at all.

Perkins.  I think he was right.

Yardsley.  Oh yes, of course I’m never right.  What am I stage-manager for?

Perkins.  Oh, as for that, of course, you are the one in authority, but you were wrong about the white tie and the dinner coat.  He was a bogus earl, an adventurer, wasn’t he?

Yardsley.  Yes, he was, but—­

Perkins.  Well, no real earl would wear a white tie with a dinner coat unless he were visiting in America.  I grant you that if he were going to a reception in New York he might wear a pair of golf trousers with a dinner coat, but in this instance his dress simply showed his bogusity, as it were.  He merely dressed the part.