Marie
What right has the public got to be so proud of itself? There’s many a woman in the audience worse than I am.
Grant
But they want to be flattered into believing they are as much like heroes and heroines as you are not. The successful playwright, like the fashionable portrait painter, flatters and never reveals.
Tom
While true artists like me starve?
Grant
And dramatists who write “Lonely Ways” also starve. What are you two kicking so about? Because I’ve made you respectable, wealthy and happy? Do you think the general public cares a whoop in Hades what I think of life, of my peculiar slant on the motives that mess up the characters that happen to interest me? No: all they want is what they want life to be.
Tom