'Oh!'
'Yes. There are people who love the drama so much that they can't go near the theatre.'
He roared with laughter, and to convince him she told him about Adnor Rodd and his bare room, where without any hope of an audience he wrote his plays and lived in them more passionately than it was possible to do in life.
Sir Henry shook his head.
'I don't mind betting,' he said, 'that he's got something wrong with him. Either he drinks, or has an impossible wife, or he likes low company, or— No. There aren't such people.'
'But there are.' And she told him how she had spent a whole day with Rodd and had gone home with him to see his rooms.
'Alone?' asked Sir Henry.
'Yes.'
'Then if you were my girl I should put you on bread and water for a week.'
To convince him, she tried to tell him how she had struggled to overcome Charles's objections to the practical use of his talent, and had forced him to come to London.... In her eagerness and in her happiness at having brought him to his senses, she lost sight of the fact that she was revealing her own history. He brought her up sharp with,—