Bangs," he said, "and it showed careful
rehearsing. But it would be a lot more effective if you had a real
situation to base it on. As it is, you're making a devil of a row about
nothing. I worked like a horse all last year, and you know it. Now I'm
resting, or loafing, if you prefer to call it that, and"--he bit off the
words and fairly threw them at his friend--"it will save you and Epstein
and Haxon a lot of mental wear and tear if you will mind your own
business and let me alone."

Bangs raised his eyes and dropped them again.

"You _are_ our business," he somberly reminded his partner. "I've got so
I can't work without you," he added, with a humility new to him. "You
know that. And you know I've got the plot. It's ready--great Scott, it's
boiling in me! I'm crazy to get it out. And here I've got to sit around
watching you kill time, while you know and I know that you'd be a damn
sight happier if you were on the job. Good Lord, Laurie, work's the
biggest thing there is in life! Doesn't it mean anything at all to you?"

"Not just now." Laurie spoke with maddening nonchalance.

"Then there's something rotten in you."

Laurie winced, but made no answer. He hoped Bangs would go on talking
and thus destroy the echo of his last words, with which the silent room
seemed filled. But nothing came. Rodney's opportunity had passed, and he
was lost in depressed realization of its failure. Laurie strolled back
to the mirror, his forgotten tie dangling in his hand.

"We'll let it go at that," he said then. "Think things over, and make up
your mind what you want to do about the contract."

"All right."

Bangs replied in the same flat notes he had used a moment before, and
without changing his position; but the two words gave Laurie a shock. He
did not believe that either Rodney or Epstein would contemplate a
dissolution of their existing partnership; but an hour ago he would not
have believed that Rodney Bangs could say to him the things he had said
just now.

He was beginning to realize that he had tried his partners sorely in the
month that had passed since his return to town; and all for what? He
himself had brought out of the foolish experience nothing save a tired
nervous system, a sense of boredom such as he had not known for a year,
and, especially when he looked at Bangs, an acute mental discomfort
which introspective persons would probably have diagnosed as the pangs
of conscience. Laurie did not take the troubl