She made a little grimace.
"You've got a right to laugh at me. I suppose that ought to have been warning enough, but Urlaub was so keen about it, and Quarterstone had already made me think he was a great producer, so I couldn't say that I thought it was awful. And then I wondered if it was just because I didn't know enough about plays."
"I don't know much about plays myself," said the Saint. "But the fact remains that Comrade Urlaub has got a complete play, with three acts and everything, god-awful though it is. I took it away with me to read it over and the more I look at it the more I'm thinking that something might be done with it."
Rosalind was aghast.
"You don't mean to say you'd really put your money into producing it?"
"Stranger things have happened," said the Saint thoughtfully. "How bad can a play be before it becomes good? And how much sense of humour is there in the movie business? Haven't you seen those reprints of old two-reelers that they show sometimes for a joke, and haven't you heard the audience laughing itself sick?… Listen. I only wish I knew who wrote Love — the Redeemer. I've got an idea…"
Mr. Homer Quarterstone could have answered his question for him, for the truth was that the author of Love — the Redeemer resided under the artistic black homburg of Mr. Homer Quarterstone. It was a matter of considerable grief to Mr. Quarterstone that no genuine producer had ever been induced to see eye to eye with him on the subject of the superlative merits of that amorous masterpiece, so that after he had grown weary of collecting rejections Mr. Quarterstone had been reduced to the practical expedient of using his magnum opus as one of the props in the more profitable but by no means less artistic drama from which he and Mr. Urlaub derived their precarious incomes; but his loyalty to the child of his brain had never been shaken.
It was therefore with a strange squirmy sensation in the pit of his stomach that Mr. Quarterstone sat in his office a few mornings later and gazed at a card in the bottom left-hand corner of which were the magic words, "Paragon Pictures, Inc., Hollywood, Calif." A feeling of fate was about him, as if he had been unexpectedly reminded of a still-cherished childhood dream.
"Show her in," he said with husky magnificence.
The order was hardly necessary, for she came in at once, shepherded by a beaming Waldemar Urlaub.