The second, a brighter and more successful man, talked with Paul for a long time about all manner of things.  Having no notion of his antecedents, he assumed him to be a friend of Rowlatt and met him on terms of social equality.  Paul expanded like a flower to the sun.  It was the first time he had spoken with an educated man on common ground—­a man to whom the great imaginative English writers were familiar friends, who ran from Chaucer to Lamb and from Dryden to Browning with amazing facility.  The strong wine of allusive talk mounted to Paul’s brain.  Tingling with excitement, he brought out all his small artillery of scholarship and acquitted himself so well that his host sent him off with a cordial letter to a manager of his acquaintance.

The letter opened the difficult door of the theatre.  His absurd beauty of face and figure, a far greater recommendation in the eyes of the manager who had begun rehearsals for an elaborate romantic production than a knowledge of The Faerie Queene, obtained for him an immediate engagement—­to walk on as a gilded youth of Italy in two or three scenes at a salary of thirty shillings a week.  Paul went home and spread himself like a young peacock before Jane, and said:  “I am an actor.”

The girl’s eyes glowed.  “You are wonderful.”

“No, not I,” replied Paul modestly.  “It is my star.”

“Have you got a big part?” asked Jane.

He laughed pityingly, sweeping back his black curls.  “No, you silly,
I haven’t any lines to speak”—­he had at once caught up the phrase—­
“I must begin at the beginning.  Every actor has to do it.”

“You’ll get mother and me orders to come and see you, won’t you?”

“You shall have a box,” declared Paul the magnificent.

Thus began a new phase in the career of Paul Kegworthy.  After the first few days of bewilderment on the bare, bleak stage, where oddments of dilapidated furniture served to indicate thrones and staircases and palace doors and mossy banks; where men and women in ordinary costume behaved towards one another in the most ridiculous way and went through unintelligible actions with phantom properties; where the actor-manager would pause in the breath of an impassioned utterance and cry out, “Oh, my God! stop that hammering!” where nothing looked the least bit in the world like the lovely ordered picture he had been accustomed to delight in from the shilling gallery—­after the first few days he began to focus this strange world and to suffer its fascination.  And he was proud of the silent part allotted to him, a lazy lute-player in attendance on the great lady, who lounged about on terrace steps in picturesque attitudes.  He was glad that he was not an unimportant member of the crowd of courtiers who came on in a bunch and bowed and nodded and pretended to talk to one another and went off again.  He realized that he would be in sight of the audience all the time.  It did not strike him that the manager was using him merely as a piece of decoration.