Frank Armstrong laughed.
"I don't," he said. "I work best after a large meal. No: I did not have breakfast, because it would have been highly inconvenient to pay for it. There are such people, you know. I have often been one of them."
Arthur Craddock found this peremptory young savage slightly alarming. For himself he demanded that social intercourse should be conducted in a sort of atmosphere of politeness, of manners. Just as in landscape-painting you had to have atmosphere, else the effect was of cast-iron, so in dealings with your fellow-men. There should be no such things as edges, particularly raw ones. He thought he had seldom seen anybody so unatmospheric.
"My dear fellow," he said. "Do you mean that you have been actually in want of money to pay for food? Why did you not tell me? You knew what an interest I took in you and your work."
Frank looked at him quite unatmospherically.
"But why should my having breakfast matter to you?" he said. "You wanted my work, if you thought it good: if not, I was no more to you than all the rest of the brutes who go without breakfast. Now about the play. At least, I don't suppose you asked me to lunch in order to talk about breakfast. I quite expect you to tell me it's twaddle, indeed, I know it is. But does it by any chance seem to you remunerative twaddle?"
Craddock really suffered in this want of atmosphere. He gasped, mentally speaking, like an unaccustomed aeronaut in rarefied air.
"Ah, I can't agree with you that it is twaddle," he said. "The plot no doubt is slender, but the dialogue is excellent, and you show considerable precision and fineness of line in the character-drawing."
"But what characters?" said the candid author. "The curate, the housemaid, the churchwarden. Lord, what people, without a shred of life or force in them. But it answered your description of what theatre-goers liked. I wrote it last year, in a reaction after the 'Lane without a Turning.'"
"Ah, was that it?" said Craddock. "It puzzled me to know how a boy like you—you are a boy, my dear fellow—could possibly write anything so bitter and hopeless as that, and something so quietly genial as 'Easter Eggs.'"