once send him half of it. His letters were
childishly ill-conditioned and unreasonable; but, believing him to be in
extreme indigence, I felt too sorry for him even to argue the point.
Again and again I had helped him, and it seemed sordid and silly to hurt
our old friendship for money. I couldn't believe that he would talk of
my having done anything that I ought not to have done if we met, so as
soon as I could I crossed to Paris to have it out with him.

To my astonishment I found him obdurate in his wrong-headedness. When I
asked him what he had sold me for the L50 I paid him, he coolly said he
didn't think I was serious, that no man would write a play on another
man's scenario; it was absurd, impossible--"_C'est ridicule!_" he
repeated again and again. When I reminded him that Shakespeare had done
it, he got angry: it was altogether different then--today: "_C'est
ridicule!_" Tired of going over and over the old ground I pressed him to
tell me what he wanted. For hours he wouldn't say: then at length he
declared he ought to have half of all the play fetched, and even that
wouldn't be fair to him, as he was a dramatist and I was not, and I
ought not to have touched his scenario and so on, over and over again.

I returned to my hotel wearied in heart and head by his ridiculous
demands and reiterations. After thrashing the beaten straw to dust on
the following day, I agreed at length to give him another L50 down and
another L50 later. Even then he pretended to be very sorry indeed that I
had taken what he called "his play," and assured me in the same breath
that "Mr. and Mrs. Daventry" would be a rank failure: "Plays cannot be
written by amateurs; plays require knowledge of the stage. It's quite
absurd of you, Frank, who hardly ever go to the theatre, to think you
can write a successful play straight off. I always loved the theatre,
always went to every first night in London, have the stage in my blood,"
and so forth and so on. I could not help recalling what he had told me
years before, that when he had to write his first play for George
Alexander, he shut himself up for a fortnight with the most successful
modern French plays, and so learned his _metier_.

Next day I returned to London, understanding now something of the
unreasonable persistence in begging which had aroused Lord Alfred
Douglas' rage.

As soon as my play was advertised a crowd of people confronted me with
claims I had never expected. Mrs. Brown Pott