There followed a phenomenon that would have been incomprehensible to anybody who was not intimately concerned with the professional theatre. Knight and Miss Bracey were suddenly allied. Insults of the immediate past were as if they had never been. They both began acting beautifully for each other: Gertrude making big eloquent piteous gestures and Marcus responding with massive understanding. She wept. He kissed her hand. They turned with the precision of variety artists to the auditorium and simultaneously shaded their eyes like comic sailors. Grove came gaily down the aisle saying: ‘I apologize. Marcus and Gerts. Everybody. I really do apologize. In seventeen plastic and entirely different positions. I shall go and be devoured backstage by the worm of contrition. What more can I do? I cannot say with even marginal accuracy that it’s all a mistake and you’re not at all funny. But anything else. Anything else.’

‘Be quiet,’ Peregrine said, forcing a note of domineering authority which was entirely foreign to him. ‘You will certainly go back-stage since you are needed. I will see you after we break. In the meantime I wish neither to see nor hear from you until you make your entrance. Is that understood?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Grove said quietly. ‘I really am.’ And he went back-stage by the pass-door that Mr Conducis used when he pulled Peregrine out of the well.

‘Marco and Gertie,’ Peregrine said and they turned blackly upon him. ‘I hope you’ll be very generous and do something nobody has a right to ask you. I hope you’ll dismiss the lamentable incident as if it had never happened.’

‘It is either that person or me. Never in the entire course of my professional experience – ’

The Knight temperament raged on. Gertrude listened with gloomy approval and repaired face. The rest of the company were still as mice. At last Peregrine managed to bring about a truce and eventually they began again at: ‘Who is this comes hopping up the lane?’

The row had had one startling and most desirable effect. Gertrude, perhaps by some process of emotive transference, now gave out her offstage line with all the venom of a fish-wife.

‘But darling,’ reasoned Destiny Meade, a few minutes later, devouring Peregrine with her great black lamps. ‘Hopping. Me? On my first entrance? I mean – actually what an entrance! Hopping!’

‘Destiny, love, it’s like I said. He had a thing about it.’

‘Who did?’

‘Shakespeare, darling. About a breathless, panting, jigging, hopping woman with a white face and pitchball eyes and blue veins.’

‘How peculiar of him.’

‘The thing is, for him it was all an expression of sexual attraction.’

‘I don’t see how I can do a sexy thing if I come on playing hopscotch and puffing and blowing like a whale. Truly.’

‘Destiny: listen to what he wrote. Listen.