“Oh, you are too sensitive, old man. They did not even write anything in particular for news, and think how many of my friends at college they failed to mention.”
“Oh, well; they knew I was with you, and one of them might have asked for me. I hope you may go back to Yale, Merry, but wild horses could not drag me back there! I hate them all!”
“Hate them, Hodge?”
“Yes, hate them!” Bart almost shouted. “They are a lot of cads! There is not a whole man among them!”
Then he strode out of the room, giving the door a bang behind him.
Of course Frank made haste to reply to the letters of his college chums, assuring them that the checks were perfectly good, and adding that, although he had some reputation as a practical joker, he was not quite crazy enough to utter a worthless check on a well-known bank, as that would be a criminal act.
Frank mentioned Hodge, and, without saying so in so many words, gave them to understand that Bart felt the slight of not being spoken of in any of the letters from his former acquaintances.
One thing Frank did not tell them, and that was that he was on the point of starting out again with his play, having renamed it, and rewritten it, and added a sensational feature of the “spectacular” order in the view of a boat race between Yale, Harvard and Cornell.
Even though he was venturing everything on the success of the piece, Merry realized now better than ever before that no man was so infallible that he could always correctly foretell the fate of an untried play.
It is a great speculation to put a play on the road at large expense. The oldest managers are sometimes deceived in the value of a dramatic piece of property, and it is not an infrequent thing that they lose thousands of dollars in staging and producing a play in which they have the greatest confidence, but which the theater-going public absolutely refuses to accept.