able to-night! Ass!" He had
halted for a second in front of the manager, but resumed his pacing with
a mutter of subterranean thunder: "Mounet-Sully!"

"Hasn't the public got a mind?" cried Canby. "Doesn't the public
understand that a good play might be ruined by these scoundrels?"

Old Tinker returned his chartreuse glass to the case whence it came, a
miniature sedan chair in silver and painted silk. "The public?" he said.
"I've never been able to find out what that was. Just about the time I
decided it was a trained sheep it turned out to be a cyclone. You think
it's intelligent, and it plays the fool; you decide it's a fool, and
it turns out to know more than you do. You make love to it, and it may
sidle up and kiss you--or give you a good, hard kick!"

"But if we make this a good play--"

"It won't be a play at all," said Tinker, "unless the public thinks it's
a good one. A play isn't something you read; it's something actors do on
a stage; and they can't afford to do it unless the public pays to watch
'em. If it won't buy tickets, you haven't got a play; you've only got
some typewriting."

Canby glanced involuntarily at the blue-covered manuscript he had placed
upon a table beside him. It had a guilty look.

"I get confused," he said. "If the public's so flighty, why does it take
so much stock in what these wolves print about a play?"

"Print. That's it," old Tinker answered serenely. "Write your opinion in
a letter or say it with your mouth, and it doesn't amount to anything.
Print's different. You see some nonsense about yourself in a newspaper,
and you think I'm an idiot for believing it. But you read nonsense about
me, and you believe it. You don't stop and think; 'That's a lie; he
isn't that sort of a man.' No. You just wonder why I'm such a darn
fool."

"Then these cannibals have got us where--"

"Dotage!" Talbot Potter broke in, halting under the chandelier.
"Tinker's reached his dotage!" He levelled a denouncing forefinger at
the manager. "Do you mean to tell me that if I decide to go on with Mr.
Canby's play any critic or combination or cabal of critics can keep it
from being a success? Then I tell you, you're in your dotage! For one
point, if I play this part they're going to say it's a big thing; I
don't mean the play, of course, because you must know, yourself, Mr.
Canby, we could bribe them into calling it a strong play. We know it
isn't, and they'll know it isn't. What I mean is the characte