Part 16 (2/2)

She wondered if Maxwell ever met her, but she was ashamed to ask him, and he did not mention her. Only once when they were together did they happen to encounter her, and then he said, quite simply, ”I think she's certainly an actress. That public look of the eyes is unmistakable.

Emotional parts, I should say.”

Louise forced herself to suggest, ”You might get her to let you do a play for her.”

”I doubt if I could do anything unwholesome enough for her.”

At last the summons they were expecting from Grayson came, just after they had made up their minds to wait another week for it.

Louise had taken the letter from the maid, and she handed it to Maxwell with a gasp at sight of the Argosy theatre address printed in the corner of the envelope. ”I know it's a refusal.”

”If you think that will make it an acceptance,” he had the hardihood to answer, ”it won't. I've tried that sort of thing too often;” and he tore open the letter.

It was neither a refusal nor an acceptance, and their hopes soared again, hers visibly, his secretly, to find it a friendly confession that the manager had not found time to read the play until the night before, and a request that Maxwell would drop in any day between twelve and one, which was rather a leisure time with him, and talk it over.

”Don't lose an instant, dear!” she adjured him.

”It's only nine o'clock,” he answered, ”and I shall have to lose several instants.”

”That is so,” she lamented; and then they began to canvas the probable intention of the manager's note. She held out pa.s.sionately to the end for the most encouraging interpretation of it, but she did not feel that it would have any malign effect upon the fact for him to say, ”Oh, it's just a way of letting me down easy,” and it clearly gave him great heart to say so.

When he went off to meet his fate, she watched him, trembling, from the window; as she saw him mounting the elevated steps, she wondered at his courage; she had given him all her own.

The manager met him with ”Ah, I'm glad you came soon. These things fade out of one's mind so, and I really want to talk about your play. I've been very much interested in it.”

Maxwell could only bow his head and murmur something about being very glad, very, very glad, with a stupid iteration.

”I suppose you know, as well as I do, that it's two plays, and that it's only half as good as if it were one.”

The manager wheeled around from his table, and looked keenly at the author, who contrived to say, ”I think I know what you mean.”

”You've got the making of the prettiest kind of little comedy in it, and you've got the making of a very strong tragedy. But I don't think your oil and water mix, exactly,” said Grayson.

”You think the interest of the love-business will detract from the interest of the homicide's fate?”

”And vice versa. Excuse me for asking something that I can very well understand your not wanting to tell till I had read your play. Isn't this the piece G.o.dolphin has been trying out West?”

”Yes, it is,” said Maxwell. ”I thought it might prejudice you against it, if--”

”Oh, that's all right. Why have you taken it from him?”

Maxwell felt that he could make up for his want of earlier frankness now. ”I didn't take it from him; he gave it back to me.”

He sketched the history of his relation to the actor, and the manager said, with smiling relish, ”Just like him, just like G.o.dolphin.” Then he added, ”I'll tell you, and you mustn't take it amiss. G.o.dolphin may not know just why he gave the piece up, and he probably thinks it's something altogether different, but you may depend upon it the trouble was your trying to ride two horses in it. Didn't you feel that it was a mistake yourself?”

”I felt it so strongly at one time that I decided to develop the love-business into a play by itself and let the other go for some other time. My wife and I talked it over. We even discussed it with G.o.dolphin.

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