"
"But, Jimmy, old top," I said, "the only objection is, don't you know,
that there's no way of getting the girl to the cottage. She cuts
Freddie. She wouldn't come within a mile of him."
Jimmy frowned.
"That's awkward," he said. "Well, we shall have to make it an exterior set
instead of an interior. We can easily corner her on the beach somewhere,
when we're ready. Meanwhile, we must get the kid letter-perfect. First
rehearsal for lines and business eleven sharp to-morrow."
Poor old Freddie was in such a gloomy state of mind that we decided not
to tell him the idea till we had finished coaching the kid. He wasn't
in the mood to have a thing like that hanging over him. So we
concentrated on Tootles. And pretty early in the proceedings we saw
that the only way to get Tootles worked up to the spirit of the thing
was to introduce sweets of some sort as a sub-motive, so to speak.
"The chief difficulty," said Jimmy Pinkerton at the end of the first
rehearsal, "is to establish a connection in the kid's mind between his
line and the sweets. Once he has grasped the basic fact that those two
words, clearly spoken, result automatically in acid-drops, we have got
a success."
I've often thought, don't you know, how interesting it must be to be
one of those animal-trainer Johnnies: to stimulate the dawning
intelligence, and that sort of thing.
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