“How long will it take?” asked the sergeant, dubiously.

“Eight minutes,” said the playwright.  “The entire play consumes but thirty.”

“You may go ahead,” said the sergeant.  “Most of you seem to side against the little lady.  Maybe she had a right to crack up a saucer or two in that restaurant.  We’ll see how she does the turn before we take that up.”

The matron of the police station had been standing near, listening to the singular argument.  She came nigher and stood near the sergeant’s chair.  Two or three of the reserves strolled in, big and yawning.

“Before beginning the scene,” said the playwright, “and assuming that you have not seen a production of ‘A Gay Coquette,’ I will make a brief but necessary explanation.  It is a musical-farce-comedy—­ burlesque-comedietta.  As the title implies, Miss Carroll’s role is that of a gay, rollicking, mischievous, heartless coquette.  She sustains that character throughout the entire comedy part of the production.  And I have designed the extravaganza features so that she may preserve and present the same coquettish idea.

“Now, the scene in which we take exception to Miss Carroll’s acting is called the ‘gorilla dance.’  She is costumed to represent a wood nymph, and there is a great song-and-dance scene with a gorilla—­played by Mr. Delmars, the comedian.  A tropical-forest stage is set.

“That used to get four and five recalls.  The main thing was the acting and the dance—­it was the funniest thing in New York for five months.  Delmars’s song, ‘I’ll Woo Thee to My Sylvan Home,’ while he and Miss Carroll were cutting hide-and-seek capers among the tropical plants, was a winner.”

“What’s the trouble with the scene now?” asked the sergeant.

“Miss Carroll spoils it right in the middle of it,” said the playwright wrathfully.

With a wide gesture of her ever-moving arms the actress waved back the little group of spectators, leaving a space in front of the desk for the scene of her vindication or fall.  Then she whipped off her long tan cloak and tossed it across the arm of the policeman who still stood officially among them.

Miss Carroll had gone to supper well cloaked, but in the costume of the tropic wood nymph.  A skirt of fern leaves touched her knee; she was like a humming-bird—­green and golden and purple.

And then she danced a fluttering, fantastic dance, so agile and light and mazy in her steps that the other three members of the Carroll Comedy Company broke into applause at the art of it.

And at the proper time Delmars leaped out at her side, mimicking the uncouth, hideous bounds of the gorilla so funnily that the grizzled sergeant himself gave a short laugh like the closing of a padlock.  They danced together the gorilla dance, and won a hand from all.

Then began the most fantastic part of the scene—­the wooing of the nymph by the gorilla.  It was a kind of dance itself—­eccentric and prankish, with the nymph in coquettish and seductive retreat, followed by the gorilla as he sang “I’ll Woo Thee to My Sylvan Home.”