Only Kennicott, Guy, and Vida helped her.  They speculated as to how flats could be lashed together to form a wall; they hung crocus-yellow curtains at the windows; they blacked the sheet-iron stove; they put on aprons and swept.  The rest of the association dropped into the theater every evening, and were literary and superior.  They had borrowed Carol’s manuals of play-production and had become extremely stagey in vocabulary.

Juanita Haydock, Rita Simons, and Raymie Wutherspoon sat on a sawhorse, watching Carol try to get the right position for a picture on the wall in the first scene.

“I don’t want to hand myself anything but I believe I’ll give a swell performance in this first act,” confided Juanita.  “I wish Carol wasn’t so bossy though.  She doesn’t understand clothes.  I want to wear, oh, a dandy dress I have—­all scarlet—­and I said to her, ’When I enter wouldn’t it knock their eyes out if I just stood there at the door in this straight scarlet thing?’ But she wouldn’t let me.”

Young Rita agreed, “She’s so much taken up with her old details and carpentering and everything that she can’t see the picture as a whole.  Now I thought it would be lovely if we had an office-scene like the one in ‘Little, But Oh My!’ Because I saw that, in Duluth.  But she simply wouldn’t listen at all.”

Juanita sighed, “I wanted to give one speech like Ethel Barrymore would, if she was in a play like this. (Harry and I heard her one time in Minneapolis—­we had dandy seats, in the orchestra—­I just know I could imitate her.) Carol didn’t pay any attention to my suggestion.  I don’t want to criticize but I guess Ethel knows more about acting than Carol does!”

“Say, do you think Carol has the right dope about using a strip light behind the fireplace in the second act?  I told her I thought we ought to use a bunch,” offered Raymie.  “And I suggested it would be lovely if we used a cyclorama outside the window in the first act, and what do you think she said?  ’Yes, and it would be lovely to have Eleanora Duse play the lead,’ she said, ’and aside from the fact that it’s evening in the first act, you’re a great technician,’ she said.  I must say I think she was pretty sarcastic.  I’ve been reading up, and I know I could build a cyclorama, if she didn’t want to run everything.”

“Yes, and another thing, I think the entrance in the first act ought to be L. U. E., not L. 3 E.,” from Juanita.

“And why does she just use plain white tormenters?”

“What’s a tormenter?” blurted Rita Simons.

The savants stared at her ignorance.

III

Carol did not resent their criticisms, she didn’t very much resent their sudden knowledge, so long as they let her make pictures.  It was at rehearsals that the quarrrels broke.  No one understood that rehearsals were as real engagements as bridge-games or sociables at the Episcopal Church.  They gaily came in half an hour late, or they vociferously came in ten minutes early, and they were so hurt that they whispered about resigning when Carol protested.  They telephoned, “I don’t think I’d better come out; afraid the dampness might start my toothache,” or “Guess can’t make it tonight; Dave wants me to sit in on a poker game.”