Page:Christopher Morley--Tales from a rolltop desk.djvu/250

the door. My mouth was open to tell him my surprising news when I saw that he was unpleasantly agitated. First he insisted on returning my loan, although I begged him to believe that there need be no hurry about it.

"Rehearsals began to-day," he said. He sat down on the bed and looked very sombre. "The worst possible has happened," he said. "Fagan's directing."

I tried to console him. Perhaps I felt that if Upton had shown such good sense in his choice of a press representative his judgment in directors couldn't be altogether wrong.

"Oh, well," I said, "if the play's as good as you say, he can't hurt it much. Upton believes in it, he won't let Fagan chop it about, will he? And he's got a good cast—they won't need much direction: they know how to handle that kind of thing."

"It's plain you don't know the game," he said. "If Upton had combed Broadway from Herald Square to Reisenweber's, he couldn't have found a man so superbly equipped to kill the piece. As for poor Sampson, God help him. Fagan is a typical Broadway hanger-on, with plenty of debased cunning of his own; not a fool at all; but the last man for this kind of show, which needs imagination, atmosphere, delicate tone and tempo.