Canby, feeling a natural prejudice against this personage, glanced uneasily at Talbot Potter's face and was surprised to find that fine bit of modelling contorted with rage. The sight of this emotion was reassuring, but its source was a mystery, for it had seemed to the playwright that the wasp-waisted youth's remarks—though horribly damaging to the cheap little Canbys with their cheap little “Roderick Hanscoms”—were on the whole rather flattering to the subject of them, and betokened a real interest in his career.
“Ass!” said Potter.
Canby exhaled a breath of relief. He began to feel that it might be possible to like this man.
“Ass!” said Potter, striding up and down the room. “Ass! Ass! Ass! Ass!”
And Canby felt easier and happier. He foresaw, too, that there would be no cabling to Rostand, a thing he had naively feared, for a moment, as imminent.
Potter halted, bursting into speech less monosyllabic but no less vehement: “Mr. Tinker, did you ever see Mounet-Sully?”
“No.”
“Did you, Mr. Canby?”
“No.”
“Mewnay-Sooyay!” Potter mimicked the pronunciation of his adviser. “'Mewnay-Sooyay! Of coss I don't say YOU could ever be another Mewnay-Sooyay!' Ass! I'll tell you what Mounet-Sully's 'technique' amounts to, Mr. Tinker. It's yell! Just yell, yell, yell! Does he think I can't yell! Why, Packer could open his mouth like a hippopotamus and yell through a part! Ass!”