After the act was over Hart found the manager in the box office, and got Cherry’s address.  At five the next afternoon he called at the musty old house in the West Forties and sent up his professional card.

By daylight, in a secular shirtwaist and plain voile skirt, with her hair curbed and her Sister of Charity eyes, Winona Cherry might have been playing the part of Prudence Wise, the deacon’s daughter, in the great (unwritten) New England drama not yet entitled anything.

“I know your act, Mr. Hart,” she said after she had looked over his card carefully.  “What did you wish to see me about?”

“I saw you work last night,” said Hart.  “I’ve written a sketch that I’ve been saving up.  It’s for two; and I think you can do the other part.  I thought I’d see you about it.”

“Come in the parlor,” said Miss Cherry.  “I’ve been wishing for something of the sort.  I think I’d like to act instead of doing turns.”

Bob Hart drew his cherished “Mice Will Play” from his pocket, and read it to her.

“Read it again, please,” said Miss Cherry.

And then she pointed out to him clearly how it could be improved by introducing a messenger instead of a telephone call, and cutting the dialogue just before the climax while they were struggling with the pistol, and by completely changing the lines and business of Helen Grimes at the point where her jealousy overcomes her.  Hart yielded to all her strictures without argument.  She had at once put her finger on the sketch’s weaker points.  That was her woman’s intuition that he had lacked.  At the end of their talk Hart was willing to stake the judgment, experience, and savings of his four years of vaudeville that “Mice Will Play” would blossom into a perennial flower in the garden of the circuits.  Miss Cherry was slower to decide.  After many puckerings of her smooth young brow and tappings on her small, white teeth with the end of a lead pencil she gave out her dictum.

“Mr. Hart,” said she, “I believe your sketch is going to win out.  That Grimes part fits me like a shrinkable flannel after its first trip to a handless hand laundry.  I can make it stand out like the colonel of the Forty-fourth Regiment at a Little Mothers’ Bazaar.  And I’ve seen you work.  I know what you can do with the other part.  But business is business.  How much do you get a week for the stunt you do now?”

“Two hundred,” answered Hart.

“I get one hundred for mine,” said Cherry.  “That’s about the natural discount for a woman.  But I live on it and put a few simoleons every week under the loose brick in the old kitchen hearth.  The stage is all right.  I love it; but there’s something else I love better—­that’s a little country home, some day, with Plymouth Rock chickens and six ducks wandering around the yard.