curtain! Yet
in the end the poet escaped scot-free. Goldwater was a coward, Kloot a
sage. The same prudence that had led Kloot to exclude authors, saved
him from magnifying their importance by police squabbles. Besides, a
clever lawyer might prove the exclusion illegal. What was done was
done. The dignity of the hero of a hundred dramas was best served by
private beefsteaks and a rumoured version, irrefutable save in a court
of law. It was bad enough that the Heathen Journalist should supply so
graphic a picture of the midnight melodrama, coloured even more highly
than Goldwater's eyes. Kloot had been glad that the Journalist had
left before the episode; but when he saw the account he wished the
scribe had stayed.

'He won't play Hamlet with that pair of shiners,' Pinchas prophesied
early the next morning to the supping cafe.

Radsikoff beamed and refilled Pinchas's glass with champagne. He had
carried out his promise of assisting at the premiere, and was now
paying for the poet's supper.

'You're the first playwright Goldwater hasn't managed to dodge,' he
chuckled.

'Ah!' said the poet meditatively. 'Action is greater than Thought.
Action is the greatest thing in the world.'

THE CONVERTS

THE CONVERTS

I

As he sat on his hard stool in the whitewashed workshop on the Bowery,
clumsily pasting the flamboyant portrait on the boxes of the 'Yvonne
Rupert cigar,' he wondered dully--after the first flush of joy at
getting a job after weeks of hunger--at the strange fate that had
again brought him into connection, however remote, with stageland. For
even to Elkan Mandle, with his Ghetto purview, Yvonne Rupert's fame,
both as a 'Parisian' star and the queen of American advertisers, had
penetrated. Ever since she had summoned a Jewish florist for not
paying her for the hundred and eleven bouquets with which a single
week's engagement in vaudeville had enabled her to supply him, the
journals had continued to paragraph her amusing, self-puffing
adventures.

Not that there was much similarity between the New York star and his
little actress of the humble Yiddish Theatre in London, save for that
aureole of fluffy hair, which belonged rather to the genus than the
individual. But as the great Yvonne's highly-coloured charms went on
repeating themselves from every box-cover he manipulated (at
seventy-five cents a hundred), the face of his own Gittel grew more
and more vivid, till at last the whole splendid