d his glass mechanically and was vaguely surprised to find
himself drinking champagne. Then he remembered that champagne had been
ordered to "buck" him "up"; he remembered, too, Manders' solicitude for
his health, the enquiries when the play had been written and how long he
had taken to write it, the evasion and silence the night before on the
telephone and again at the beginning of luncheon, when he tried to
extract a frank opinion. . . . Manders, then, was rejecting the play . . .
and trying to be considerate. . . .

"We don't mince matters at rehearsal," he said with a breathless laugh.
"You think the play's hopeless?"

Manders looked relieved, but he had known so many disappointments
himself and seen others so often crushed by them that his brown, monkey
eyes were full of pity.

"It's no use at all. In its present form or any other. If it had been
any one but you, I wouldn't have read two pages of it. You may as well
take the whole of your physic, boy; you've got to stop writing for the
present, you've lost your sense of the theatre, you're forgetting all
the tricks you ever learned. D'you know, when I read that thing, I
thought for a moment that you were trying to palm off some old thing
that you'd written when you were an undergrad?"

For a moment Eric lost his sense of distance; the long coffee-room was
full of shouting and discordant laughter; a waiter, who seemed quite
near, asked in a remote voice whether he might take the black pepper. . . .
Eric gripped the edge of the table, praying that he might not
disgrace himself.

"I wonder--_why_," he murmured faintly.

Manders shrugged his shoulders and filled both glasses encouragingly.

"It often happens. Graham Lever had three plays running in London at the
same time; then he chucked romantic comedy and tried to write a
revolt-of-the-younger-generation problem play. . . ." Manders omitted to
add that Lever had never had another play staged, but Eric's ten years
of dramatic criticism enabled him to fill the gap. "George Sharpe failed
again and again for eight years; he had one success and then failed for
three. It would be hard to think of a man who never loses his touch.
Partly it's the author and partly it's the audience; they get tired . . .
and, when one kind of play succeeds, all the other men unconsciously
imitate, and the managers can only see money in that one kind, so that
the public gets sated. With you . . ." He paused to tear his bread into
lump