This time he’s barking about a leather sofa against the far wall of the humble home.  He says it’s an office sofa and where in something is the red plush one that belongs to the set?  He’s barking dangerously at everyone round him when all at once he’s choked off something grand by the weeping mother that has lost her third set of tears.  She was wiping glycerine off her face and saying things to the grouch that must of give him a cold chill for a minute.  I’m sometimes accused of doing things with language myself, but never in my life have I talked so interestingly—­at least not before ladies.  Not that I blamed her.

Everyone kept still with horror till she run down; it seems it’s a fierce crime in that art to give a director what’s coming to him.  The policeman and the erring son was so scared they just stood there acting their parts and the grouch was frozen with his mouth half open.  Probably he hadn’t believed it at first.  Then all at once he smiled the loveliest smile you ever seen on a human face and says in chilled tones:  “That will be all, Miss St. Clair!  We will trouble you no further in this production.”  His words sounded like cracking up a hunk of ice for the cocktail shaker.  Miss St. Clair then throws up her arms and rushes off, shrieking to the limit of a bully voice.

It was an exciting introduction for me to what they call the silent drama.

Then I looked at Vida and she was crying her eyes out.  I guessed it was from sympathy with the mother actress, but the grouch also stares at her with his gimlet eyes and says: 

“Here, don’t you waste any tears on her.  That’s all in the day’s work.”

“I—­wasn’t thinking of her,” sobs Vida.

“Then what you crying for?” says he.

“For that poor dear boy that’s being dragged from his mother to prison for some childish prank,” she blubbers.

Me, I laughed right out at the little fool, but the director didn’t laugh.

“Well, I’ll be damned!” says he in low, reverent tones.

Then he begins to look into her face like he’d lost something there.  Then he backed off and looked into it a minute more.  Then he went crazy all over the place.

“Here,” he barks at another actress, “get this woman into your dressing room and get the number five on her quick.  Make her up for this part, understand?  You there, Eddie, run get that calico skirt and black-satin waist off Miss St. Clair and hustle ’em over to Miss Harcourt’s room, where this lady will be making up.  Come on now!  Move!  Work quick!  We can’t be on this scene all day.”

Then, when everybody run off, he set down on the red plush sofa that was now in place, relighted a cigar that smelled like it had gone out three days before, and grinned at me in an excited manner.