telling me that polishing powder is rank poison."

"_I_ didn't told you that," Maikafer replied. "It was Feinsilver says
that."

"Rank poison!" Ringentaub exclaimed. "Why, you could eat a ton of it."

"Sure, I know," Maikafer concluded; "but who wants to?"

He turned to Louis, who had approached unobserved. "Bring me some
_Kreploch_ soup and a plate _gefuellte Rinderbrust_," he said, "not too
much gravy."

"Give me the same," Ringentaub added, as he gazed about him with the
air of an academician at a private view. "You got a nice _gemuetlicher_
place here, Mr. Trinkmann," he concluded, "only one thing you should
put in."

"What's that?" Trinkmann asked.

Maikafer kicked him on the shins, but Ringentaub failed to notice it.

"Marble-top tables," he said.

CHAPTER NINE

"RUDOLPH WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN"

All that J. Montgomery Fieldstone had done to make his name a
theatrical boarding-household word from the Pacific Coast to
Forty-sixth Street and Seventh Avenue was to exercise as a producing
manager nearly one tenth of the judgment he had displayed as Jacob M.
Fieldstone, of Fieldstone & Gips, waist manufacturers; and he voiced
his business creed in the following words:

"Now listen to me, kid," he said, "my idea has always been that, no
matter how much value you give for the money, goods don't sell
themselves. Ain't I right?"

Miss Goldie Raymond nodded, though she was wholly absorbed in a
full-length enlarged photograph which hung framed and glazed on the
wall behind Fieldstone's desk. She looked at it as a millionaire
collector might look at a Van Dyck he had recently acquired from an
impoverished duke, against a meeting of protest held in Trafalgar
Square. Her head was on one side. Her lips were parted. It was a
portrait of Miss Goldie Raymond as Mitzi in the Viennese knockout of
two continents--"Rudolph, Where Have You Been."

"Now this new show will stay on Broadway a year and a half, kid," Mr.
Fieldstone proceeded, "in case I get the right people to push it.
Therefore I'm offering you the part before I speak to any one else."

"Any one else!" Miss Raymond exclaimed. "Well, you've got a nerve,
after all I've done for you in 'Rudolph'!"

"Sure, I know," Fieldstone said; "but you've got to hand something to
Sidney Rossmore."

"Him?" Miss Raymond cried. "Say, Mont, if I had to play opposite him
another season I'd go back into vaudeville."

Fieldstone began to perspire freely. As a matter of