He guessed, after a little, that she was puzzled and even
somewhat frightened--to a certain extent she had not understood.
Nothing could appeal to him more than the opportunity to clear up her
difficulties, in the course of the examination of which he quickly
discovered that, so far as she HAD understood, she had understood
wrong. If she was crude it was only a reason the more for talking to
her; he kept saying to her "Ask me--ask me: ask me everything you
can think of."
She asked him, she was perpetually asking him, and at the first
rehearsals, which were without form and void to a degree that made
them strike him much more as the death of an experiment than as the
dawn of a success, they threshed things out immensely in a corner of
the stage, with the effect of his coming to feel that at any rate she
was in earnest. He felt more and more that his heroine was the
keystone of his arch, for which indeed the actress was very ready to
take her. But when he reminded this young lady of the way the whole
thing practically depended on her she was alarmed and even slightly
scandalised: she spoke more than once as if that could scarcely be
the right way to construct a play--make it stand or fall by one poor
nervous girl.
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