She wouldn't have minded the way she had blundered into the focus of
public attention, if, in other particulars, the rehearsal had been
going well with her. Unluckily, though, she started off wrong foot
foremost in the very first of their numbers, with a mistake that snarled
up everything and brought down an explosion of wrath from Galbraith.
Even if she'd been trying, he groaned, to make mistakes, he didn't see
how she'd managed that one. But the real nightmare didn't begin till the
first of her scenes with Sylvia, where she had to talk.
She'd said her lines over about a thousand times apiece, and practised
their inflection and phrasing in as many ways as she could think of, but
she had neglected to memorize her cues. Not altogether, of course; she
thought she'd learned them, but they were terribly scanty little cues
anyway, just a single word, usually, and never more than two, and
nothing short of absolutely automatic memorization was any good. So she
sat serene through a five-second stage wait while Quan frantically spun
the pages of his book to find the place--he ought to have been following
of course, but he'd yielded to the temptation of trying to do something
else at the same time and had got lost--and then dry-throated, incapable
of a sound for a couple of seconds more--hours they seemed--after she
had been identified as the culprit who had failed to come in on a cue.
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