You must give a supper and dance to the
whole company on the stage to-morrow night after the performance."

"What!" cried Otis Pilkington, startled out of his lethargy by this
appalling suggestion. Was he, the man who, after planking down
thirty-two thousand eight hundred and fifty, nine dollars, sixty-eight
cents for "props" and "frames" and "rehl," had sold out for a paltry
ten thousand, to be still further victimized?

"They do deserve it, don't they, after working so hard?"

"It's impossible," said Otis Pilkington vehemently. "Out of the
question."

"But, Otie, darling, I was talking to Mr. Mason when he came down to
Newport to see the piece last summer, and he told me that the
management nearly always gives a supper to the company, especially if
they have had a lot of extra rehearsing to do."

"Well, let Goble give them a supper if he wants to."

"But you know that Mr. Goble, though he has his name on the programme
as the manager, has really nothing to do with it. You own the piece,
don't you?"

For a moment Mr. Pilkington felt an impulse to reveal all, but
refrained. He knew his Aunt Olive too well. If she found out that he
had parted at a heavy loss with this valuable property, her whole
attitude towards him would change--or, rather it would revert to her
normal attitude, which was not unlike that of a severe nurse to a
weak-minded child. Even in his agony there had been a certain faint
consolation, due to the entirely unwonted note of respect in the voice
with which she had addressed him since the fall of the curtain. He
shrank from forfeiting this respect, unentitled though he was to it.

"Yes," he said in his precise voice. "That, of course, is so."

"Well, then!" said Mrs. Peagrim.

"But it seems so unnecessary! And think what it would cost."

This was a false step. Some of the reverence left Mrs. Peagrim's
voice, and she spoke a little coldly. A gay and gallant spender
herself, she had often had occasion to rebuke a tendency to
over-parsimony in her nephew.

"We must not be mean, Otie!" she said.

Mr. Pilkington keenly resented her choice of pronouns. "We" indeed!
Who was going to foot the bill? Both of them, hand in hand, or he
alone, the chump, the boob, the easy mark who got this sort of thing
wished on him!

"I don't think it would be possible to get the stage for a
supper-party," he pleaded, shifting his ground. "Goble wouldn't give
it to us."

"As if Mr. Goble would refuse you anyt