nded the demand.

"Because you wouldn't dare do it!" In his desire to make clear his point
Mr. Geltfin fairly shoveled the words out of himself, bringing them
forth overlapping one another like shingles on a roof. "Because the
public wouldn't stand for it! Always you brag, Lobel, that you know what
the public want! Well then, would the public stand for a picture where a
good, decent, straight girl that's dead and will soon be in her grave is
for six reels doing all them suggestive vampire stunts like what you
yourself, Lobel, made her do? Would the public stand for calling a dead
woman names like she-demon? They would not--not in a thousand years--and
you should both know it without I should have to tell you! With some
pretty rough things we could get by, but with that thing we could never
get by! The public, I tell you, would not stand for it. No, sir; when
that girl died the picture died with her. You just think it over once!"

Out of popped eyes he glared at them. They glared at him, then they
looked at each other. Slowly Mr. Lobel's head drooped forward as though
an unseen hand pressed against the back of his neck. Quinlan casting his
eyes downward traced with one toe the pattern of the rug under his feet.

On top of one sudden blow, heavy and hard to bear, another now had
followed. Since Lobel had become one of the topnotchers with a
reputation to maintain, expenses had been climbing by high jumps, but
receipts had not kept pace with expenses. There were the vast salaries
which even the lesser drawing cards among the stars now demanded--and
got. There were war taxes, excess profit taxes, amusement taxes. There
was to be included in the reckoning the untimely fate of Let Freedom
Ring, a vastly costly thing and quickly laughed to death, yet a smarting
memory still. Its failure had put a crimp in the edge of the exchequer.
This stroke would run a wide fluting of deficit right through the middle
of it.

The pall of silence lasted no longer than it has here taken to describe
how it fell and enveloped them. Mr. Geltfin broke the silence without
lifting the prevalent gloom. Indeed his words but depressingly served to
darken it to a very hue of midnight.

"Besides," he added, "there is anyhow another reason. We know what a
nice clean girl she was in private life. We know that all them wild
romance stories about her was cooked up in the press department to make
the suckers believe that both on and off the screen she was