She really lighted up over his praise, thanked him for it very prettily.  But then, after a little silence, she went on reflectively, “It was, in a way, for you, personally, that I was working all the time.  I don’t know if I can explain that, though I think I understand it myself.  But just because you wanted things so hard—­you were so perfectly determined that something should happen in a certain way—­I just had to help bring it about, or try to.  It would have been exciting enough just to see that things were wrong and to watch them coming right.  But taking hold one’s self and helping a little to make them come right was—­well, as I said, wonderful.”

“Well,” he said—­and now he was brusk again—­“I hope Goldsmith and Block are satisfied.  They won’t be; of course, unless the thing runs forty weeks.  But that isn’t what I want to talk about.  I want to talk about you.  I want to know what you’re aiming at.  I don’t mean to-morrow or next week.  You’ll stay with this piece, I suppose, as long as the run lasts.  But in the end, what’s the idea?  Do you want to be an actress?”

He had kept on going after that first question of his, because it was obvious the girl wasn’t ready to answer.  She seemed to be struggling to get the bearings of a perfectly new idea.  At length she gave him the clue.

“It’s that forty weeks,” she said.  “The notion of just going on—­not changing anything or improving anything; doing the same thing over and over again for forty weeks, or even four, seems perfectly ghastly.  And yet I suppose that’s what everybody in the company is hoping for—­just to keep going round and round like a horse at the end of a pole.  What I’d like to do, now that this is finished, is—­well, to start another.”

His eyes kindled.  “That’s it,” he said.  “That’s what I’ve felt about you all along.  I suppose it’s the reason I felt you never could be an actress.  You see the thing the way I do—­the whole fun of the game is getting the timing.  Once it’s got ...”  He snapped his fingers; and with an eager nod she agreed.

He was in focus now, there could he no doubt of that.  But it didn’t occur to him that it was the director who was in focus, not the man.  The fact was that in evoking the director she’d banished the man—­a triumph she wasn’t to realize the importance of until a good deal later.

“Well, then, look here,” he said.  “I’ve an idea that I could use you to good advantage as a sort of personal assistant.  There’ll be a good deal of work just of the sort you did with the sextette, teaching people to talk and move about like the sort of folk they’re supposed to represent.  That’s coming in more and more in musical comedies, the use of the chorus as real people in the story—­accounting for their exits and entrances.  It would be done more if we could teach chorus people to act human.  Well, you can do that better than I; that’s the plain truth.  And then I think after you’d