“Has it?” asked the angel, watching the perspiring face of Camden.
“It has! Big open. Hills—expensive open.”
“Is it rot?”
“Umph—listen to this!” Camden’s sharp eye lighted on a vivid sentence or two. “Not the usual type of villain—and the girl is rather unique. Up to tricks with her eyes shut. I wonder how she’ll pan out?” Camden turned the pages rapidly, overlooking some of Con’s best work, but getting what he, himself, was after.
“By Jove! she doesn’t do it!”
“What—push those matches this way—what doesn’t she do?” asked the angel.
“Eternally damn the man and claim her sex privilege of unwarranted righteousness!”
“Does she damn herself—like an idiot?” The angel was interested.
“She does not! She plays her own little rôle by the music of the experience she lived through. It’s not bad, by the lord Harry! It’s got to be tinkered—and painted up—but it’s original. Just look it over.”
Truedale’s play was pushed across the table and the angel-woman seized upon it. The taste Camden had given her—like caviar—sharpened her appetite. She read on in the swift, skipping fashion that would have crushed an author’s hopes, but which grasped the high lights and caught the deep tones. Then the woman looked up and there were genuine tears in her eyes.