It was he who had brought over from Paris to the American stage the famous Renee Paterne of the incorrigible eyes.  She made a fortune and swept the country with her song about those delinquent orbs.  But when she turned them on Hahn, in their first interview in his office, he regarded her with what is known as a long, level look.  She knew at that time not a word of English.  Sid Hahn was ignorant of French.  He said, very low, and with terrible calm to Wallie Ascher who was then acting as a sort of secretary, “Wallie, can’t you do something to make her stop rolling her eyes around at me like that?  It’s awful!  She makes me think of those heads you shy balls at, out at Coney.  Take away my ink-well.”

Renee had turned swiftly to Wallie and had said something to him in French.  Sid Hahn cocked a quick ear.  “What’s that she said?”

“She says,” translated the obliging and gifted Wallie, “that monsieur is a woman-hater.”

“My God!  I thought she didn’t understand English!”

“She doesn’t.  But she’s a woman.  Not only that, she’s a French woman.  They don’t need to know a language to understand it.”

“Where did you get that, h’m?  That wasn’t included in your Berlitz course, was it?”

Wallie Ascher had grinned—­that winning flash lighting up his dark, keen face.  “No.  I learned that in another school.”

Wallie Ascher’s early career in the theatre, if repeated here, might almost be a tiresome repetition of Hahn’s beginning.  And what Augustin Daly had been to Sid Hahn’s imagination and ambition, Sid Hahn was to Wallie’s.  Wallie, though, had been born to the theatre—­if having a tumbler for a father and a prestidigitator’s foil for a mother can be said to be a legitimate entrance into the world of the theatre.

He had been employed about the old Thalia for years before Hahn noticed him.  In the beginning he was a spindle-legged office boy in the upstairs suite of the firm of Hahn & Lohman, theatrical producers; the kind of office-boy who is addicted to shrill, clear whistling unless very firmly dealt with.  No one in the outer office realized how faultless, how rhythmic were the arpeggios and cadences that issued from those expertly puckered lips.  There was about his performance an unerring precision.  As you listened you felt that his ascent to the inevitable high note was a thing impossible of achievement.  Up—­up—­up he would go, while you held your breath in suspense.  And then he took the high note—­took it easily, insouciantly—­held it, trilled it, tossed it.

“Now, look here,” Miss Feldman would snap—­Miss Feldman of the outer office typewriter—­“look here, you kid.  Any more of that bird warbling and you go back to the woods where you belong.  This ain’t a—­a—­”

“Aviary,” suggested Wallie, almost shyly.

Miss Feldman glared.  “How did you know that word?”

“I don’t know,” helplessly.  “But it’s the word, isn’t it?”