One day, however, at rehearsal the leading lady said:  “If my lute-player could play a few chords here—­or the orchestra for him-it would help me tremendously.  I’ve got all this long cross with nothing to say.”

Paul seized his opportunity.  “I can play the mandoline,” said he.

“Oh, can you?” said the manager, and Paul was handed over to the musical director, and the next day rehearsed with a real instrument which he twanged in the manner prescribed.  He did not fail to announce himself to Jane as a musician.

Gradually he found his feet among the heterogeneous band who walk on at London theatres.  Some were frankly vulgar, some were pretentiously genteel, a good many were young men of gentle birth from the public schools and universities.  Paul’s infallible instinct drew him into timid companionship with the last.  He knew little of the things they talked about, golf and cricket prospects, and the then brain-baffling Ibsen, but he listened modestly, hoping to learn.  He reaped the advantage of having played “the sedulous ape” to his patrons of the studios.  His tricks were somewhat exaggerated; his sweep of the hat when ladies passed him at the stage door entrance was lower than custom deems necessary; he was quicker in courteous gesture than the young men from the universities; he bowed more deferentially to an interlocutor than is customary outside Court circles; but they were all the tricks of good breeding.  More than one girl asked if he were of foreign extraction.  He remembered Rowlatt’s question of years ago, and, as then, he felt curiously pleased.  He confessed to an exotic strain:  to Italian origin.  Italy was romantic.  When he obtained a line part and he appeared on the bill, he took the opportunity of changing a name linked with unpleasant associations which he did not regard as his own.  Kegworthy was cast into the limbo of common things, and he became Paul Savelli.  But this was later.

He made friends at the theatre.  Some of the women, by petting and flattery, did their best to spoil him; but Paul was too ambitious, too much absorbed in his dream of greatness and his dilettante literary and musical pursuits, too much yet of a boy to be greatly affected.  What he prized far more highly than feminine blandishments was the new comradeship with his own sex.  Instinctively he sought them, as a sick dog seeks grass, unconsciously feeling the need of them in his mental and moral development.  Besides, the attitude of the women reminded him of that of the women painters in his younger days.  He had no intention of playing the pet monkey again.  His masculinity revolted.  The young barbarian clamoured.  A hard day on the river he found much more to his taste than sporting in the shade of a Kensington flat over tea and sandwiches with no matter how sentimental an Amaryllis.  Jane, who had seen the performance, though not from a box, a couple of upper-circle seats being all that Paul could obtain from the acting-manager, and had been vastly impressed by Paul’s dominating position in the stage fairy-world, said to him, with a sniff that choked a sigh:  “Now that you’ve got all those pretty girls around you, I suppose you soon won’t think of me any longer?”